Coastal communities are grappling with challenges from the climate crisis, rural depopulation, and economic pressures. The BlueRev initiative addresses these issues by empowering coastal communities, reimagining policy frameworks and fostering adaptable governance structures. Recently, the Analysis of governance models in the pilot regions report was published, looking at current governance structures in the pilot regions. This report has served as a foundation for generating recommendations to foster economic, ecological and social development within the blue bioeconomy of the studied pilot regions in Denmark, Greenland, Italy, and Estonia.
For each pilot region, a set of recommendations for how the governance structures can be improved has been developed, building on the Governance of Innovation Systems (GOIS) model used in the initial mapping of the governance structures. The GOIS model provides a framework for structuring the recommendations under the categories: knowledge development, direction of search, resource management, market formation, legitimacy creation, and entrepreneurial experimentation – giving an indication in which broader areas change is needed for each pilot region.
Building on previous deliverables and through co-creative workshops across the pilot regions, stakeholders have been engaged to prioritize between the recommendations to find solutions with the most relevance to the regional and local contexts. The results show that there are some recommendations that are unique to individual pilot regions, such as the need to map business practices to match consumer demands in Denmark or the development of culinary tourism in Greenland. However, the key outcome of this report is the demonstration that there are significant overlaps in the need for governance reforms across the pilot regions, indicating similar problems to scale the use of side-streams across geographically dispersed areas in Europe which likely means that similar challenges and needs can be found in the blue bioeconomy in other regions.
The report gives three overarching recommendations that hold for all studied pilot regions:
• simplifying regulatory processes and increasing policy awareness
• implementing entrepreneurial support and new financing models for innovation in the blue bioeconomy
• improving collaborative efforts in blue bio-based industries