The Maritime Institute in Gdańsk invites to the international conference on the Polish route to a national maritime policy. The conference will take place in Gdańsk on September 15-16 2010.

The conference is planned to provide a holistic input of the scientific society and public administration into the process of developing the Polish national maritime policy. The most important problems and challenges are to be assessed and the inter-dependencies between sectors and branches using the sea determined.

The document “Assumptions for the Polish maritime policy until 2020” was developed in September 2009. The document defines the scope of the policy, its mission, priorities and the most important preconditions, and is the basis for developing the Polish National Maritime Policy by the Government. This policy shall implement the indications and recommendations of the “Integrated Maritime Policy for the European Union” (Communication of the Commission COM(2007) 575).

Parallel with work at EU level, work on much more extensive and diverse utilization of the sea and coasts is intensifying in the countries of the Baltic Sea Region. The considered options are often very innovative, far outside the traditional forms of sea use. The federal government in Germany adopted a strategy for the development of renewable energy, in which sea areas play an important role. Sweden is developing a Marine Act.

The increasing intensity of sea area use for economical purposes has resulted in a change in the perception of the sea space. It is now seen as a rare resource, requiring regulatory intervention of public authorities. This is why the concept of maritime spatial planning (MSP) has been developed as an answer to the increasing spatial conflicts in the sea/land relations and within the sea space itself. New classes of problems, hitherto unknown in sea areas, have appeared, such as tax dumping, irrational decisions of private subjects due to inter alia unclear ownership rights, as well as negative external effects extending outside environmental issues. Also the placement of the maritime policy is changing, because it becomes at national and EU level a part of the cohesion (regional development) policy. In a sense, maritime policy is becoming disengaged from the sea and becomes a component of the national development policy, i.e. it undergoes territorialisation.

It is envisaged that the immediate deliverable of the conference will be a list of most important tasks related to sea use and requiring the support of the political level and of public administration. This list shall have an operational format, i.e. it shall indicate not only the tasks, but also the ways of their realization and the responsible entities.

In long term, the conference should define the importance and role of the national maritime policy with respect to stakeholders, especially local, regional and national levels of public administration, and should help to identify the expectations of the stakeholders. The conference aims also at cataloguing the Polish “maritime” interests with respect to the cohesion policy of the EU, since the maritime policy is becoming a part of the cohesion policy.

We cordially invite you to Gdańsk!