Marine spatial planning in Portugal : an ocean policy analysis
Tese de doutoramento, Ciências do Mar, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2016 ; Planning of marine areas, from coastal to open-ocean regions, has been developed worldwide as a way to ensure sustainability and reduce conflict in ocean's use. Marine spatial planning (MSP) deals with the distribution of human uses in the ocean, both spatially and temporally, striving to minimize conflicts and foster compatibilities among such uses, and between uses and the environment. An important aspect of MSP is that it takes the ecosystem-based management (EBM) approach as its overarching principle, therefore putting an emphasis in allowing for socioeconomic development without compromising the use of resources by future generations. Being one of the world's largest maritime nations, Portugal has an important role in the implementation of the European Union (EU) maritime policies. The perceived need to develop sustainable ocean planning and management processes in Portugal has increased in the last decade. Accordingly, during this period two national ocean strategies were developed, the transposition and implementation of the EU Marine Strategy was pursued, and the first Portuguese MSP initiative was started. The Portuguese MSP process can be considered to have two main phases. The first one is the the Plano de Ordenamento do Espaço Marítimo (POEM) phase, which extended over a period of four years (2008-2012). During most of that period the POEM was intended to be the first Portuguese "marine spatial plan", but in the end it was instead published as a "study", thus having no legal or regulatory formal aspect. The second phase is the MSP legislation phase, which started immediately after the release of the POEM with the development of a MSP framework law. This law was promulgated in early 2014 (Law No. 17/2014), and one year later a set of MSP complementary regulations that aimed both to implement the law and to transpose the EU MSP Directive were approved as well (Decree-Law No. 38/2015). Given that the present and ...