6/35

ACHIEVEMENTS

• National efforts towards legislation on coastal areas: Egypt, Tunisia, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Algeria, Israel, Croatia • Improved institutions for ICZM: Conservatoire de littoral, APAL, ISMAL, • Better monitoring: indicators for sustainable development, national observatories, coastal observatories • MCSD: involvement of civil society, ICZM a priority • Establishment of protected areas • Improved funding: METAP, EU/MEDA/SMAP, GEF • Sub-regional initiatives: Northern Adriatic, Adriatic Ionian Initiative, RAMOGE • Coastal projects: MAP, METAP, EU, national initiatives

BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF ICAM IN THE REGION

• Insufficient national financial support for coastal programmes • There are also differences in the approach to ICAM in terms of the management focus: resource management versus traditional land-use planning • Many Mediterranean countries still rely on the traditional administrative systems, which often results with non-effective national and lower level administrative structures, weak enforcement, and no policy integration • Weak integration of environmental concerns in development planning • Civil society in most Mediterranean countries is still not fully accustomed to active participation in public affairs • Opposition from multiple private economic interests

MAJOR LEGAL BREAKTHROUGH

Protocol on Integrated Coastal Zone Management

Protocol was signed in Madrid on 21 January 2008 at the Conference of the Plenipotentiaries on the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Protocol. Fourteen Contracting Parties to the Barcelona Convention signed the Protocol at the Conference, and the others announced to do so in very near future. The Parties are now urged to ratify the Protocol so that it enters into force as soon as possible.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

• improve the advocacy and awareness in policy making at national level in SMAP beneficiary countries to engage them into the path towards the environmentally sustainable development; • to ensure that technical assistance offered by SMAP III will be considered by decision makers and to initiate the momentum for policy reform for long term sustainability; • strengthen the institutional and legal framework, as well as stakeholders' participatory capabilities, for successful implementation of new policy initiatives; • to ensure that strategies and policies developed by SMAP III ICZM projects would be considered by decision makers for a sustainable use of their coastal assets and resources by facilitating the continuous policy dialogue, efficient project implementation by participating countries, and identification of priority investment needs for the protection, restoration and rehabilitation of valuable coastal areas; • encourage and support harmonized cooperative efforts at regional level for a common policy framework for ICZM.

Policy is a social process of authoritative decision making by which members of a community clarify and secure their common interests

Policy refers to a purposive course of action followed by governments or nongovernmental actors in response to some set of perceived problems

TYPES OF INTEGRATION

• • • • • • •

systemic

: the need to ensure that all important interactions and issues are taken into consideration

sectoral

: sectoral coastal area management policies, strategies and plans have to be incorporated in the unified development policies, strategies and plans

vertical

: integration among institutions and administrative levels within the same sector

horizontal

: integration among various sectors at the same administrative level

planning

: among plans at various spatial levels, plans must not have conflicting objectives, strategies or planning proposals

temporal

: co-ordination among short-, medium- and long-term plans and programmes

spatial

: integration of marine and terrestrial parts of the coastal zone

OBJECTIVES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN WORKSHOP ON ICZM POLICY • to provide insight in the latest coastal policy initiatives; stress the success stories and try to reveal their factors of success; • to agree on the necessary preconditions for successful policy creation and implementation and to propose a set of most effective actions and tools for strengthening of the ICZM policy; • to agree on the needed actions to assist countries in adoption of the ICZM Protocol as the latest and most ambitious regional policy initiative; and • to adopt the Sardinia Charter in support of ICZM in the Mediterranean with the aim of strengthenin national and local efforts towards better ICZM policy implementation