Ocean Governance for Delivering the EU Green Deal for European Seas
Duration
Increasing pressure on European seas threatens species, habitats, and ecosystems. The EU's Green Deal aims to achieve healthy and productive seas, including a pathway to climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. This requires marine policies to function coherently across governance levels and between sectors.
CrossGov: Transdisciplinary research for coherent and cross-compliant EU ocean governance
The EU has developed a complex governance landscape to conserve the health of and manage activities within Europe's seas and coastal areas. However, this system remains fragmented due to conflicting legislation, institutional barriers, and impeding political factors such as power relations, all of which challenge or hinder the successful implementation of these policies. These extensive initiatives must be understood and streamlined by enhancing synergies and removing obstacles between governance levels and sectoral policies within the European ocean governance to support the achievement of the EU's Green Deal and inform the development of the Ocean Pact and the future Ocean Act.
From 2022 to 2025, the CrossGov project worked to improve the coherence of multi-level and multi-sectoral marine policies so they better support the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems undergoing rapid change. Over three years, CrossGov analysed links between major EU directives, including the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), Water Framework Directive (WFD), Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSPD), Habitats and Birds Directives, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and renewable energy legislation.
CrossGov produced a number of key outputs including: a Policy Coherence Handbook, which offers practical guidance on assessing and improving policy coherence in marine and coastal governance; three policy roadmaps – Offshore Wind Energy, Agriculture Pollution and Fisheries – for improved marine policy coherence in the European Union; a blueprint with recommendations to strengthen Science-Policy-Society Interfaces (SPSI) in the marine domain; and a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focusing on policy coherence in marine policy. Underpinning these outputs, CrossGov carried out nine case studies across Europe, published more than nineteen scientific articles, and delivered several capacity-building outputs, such as a Summer School.
Ocean governance and EU marine Policy
RIFS, in partnership with the University of Eastern Finland, was responsible for Work Package (WP) 2 focusing on EU marine policy and governance. RIFS researchers contributed to work on mapping policy landscapes, examining the design of selected EU directives, and identifying where policy arrangements support or slow down progress toward the Green Deal’s marine objectives. In addition, RIFS led a case study focusing on offshore wind energy and biodiversity conservation in the German North Sea.
This work forms part of RIFS’ broader EU ocean governance cluster, which also includes OceanNETs, MarineSABRES, SOS-ZEROPOL2030 and PermaGov.
Further links
Funding information
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101060958.