Portugal has the potential to harness more benefits from a growing ocean economy in years to come, with the Directorate-General for Natural Resources, Safety and Maritime Services ((Direção-Geral de Recursos Naturais, Segurança e Serviços Marítimos, DGRM) already playing a critical role with its large portfolio covering Portuguese maritime affairs.
Following a 24-month joint project conducted in close collaboration with Portuguese stakeholders, this OECD report, supported by the European Commission, formulates recommendations aimed at ensuring that sustainability and digitalisation objectives are thoroughly embedded in the DGRM’s institutional settings, workforce planning, administrative processes, and data collection and use.
The DGRM’s missions and activities could inspire other EU Member States. In particular:
The complementarity of the DGRM’s mandates – ports, maritime transports, fisheries, aquaculture and marine spatial planning – provides a privileged view of coherence and sustainability issues for Portugal’s ocean economy.
In its unique positioning, the DGRM links policy and regulation setting, spatial planning, processes for issuing licences, and data. This operational understanding gives the DGRM visibility on policy interactions and is complementary to high-level political considerations.
The DGRM has advanced capacities and sophisticated methodologies to undertake maritime spatial planning while considering potential conflicting uses of marine areas and sustainability issues.
The DGRM has started to deploy efforts to digitalise its administrative processes through an online platform (Balcão Eletrónico do Mar, BMar), particularly related to aquaculture and maritime affairs.
The DGRM faces some inherent administrative challenges, though, and Portuguese authorities could gain stronger overall efficiencies in many domains, from maritime spatial planning to aquaculture to flag state management, by engaging in some evolutions in the DGRM’s status:
Transforming the DGRM into an agency model to increase its flexibility in human resources and financial decisions would improve its responsiveness to its increasing needs and responsibilities.
Upskilling its employees, introducing policy coherence tools (i.e. Policy Coherence Matrixes and Sustainability Checks) for better mapping policy interlinkages, improving data interoperability and common protocols across administrations and further integrate practices and views from national stakeholders and other countries would enhance the DGRM’s capacities in maritime spatial planning.
Simplifying regulations for aquaculture permits and ship registration, strengthening digitalisation and improving the interoperability of online platforms and portals (e.g. BMar; Sistema Nacional de Embarcações e Marítimos/National Ship and Seafarer System, SNEM; Sistema Integrado de Licenciamento do ambiente/Integrated Environmental Licensing System, SILiAmb; and Capitania online).
Further linking Portugal’s national policies to operational processes and data on the ocean economy by involving the DGRM more closely in policy making during ministerial discussions about policy strategies and budget allocation and by strengthening its role in monitoring the National Ocean Strategy. The collaboration between the DGRM, the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Competence Centre for Planning, Policy and Foresight of the Public Administration, in charge of implementing the 2030 Agenda, could be strengthened in view of enhancing overall coherence and sustainability in the ocean sector at the national level.
