Bangladesh: Blue Economy Marine Spatial Planning (MSP)

The objectives of the task are to improve the knowledge base to increase institutional capacity, promote targeted policy actions/interventions, and streamline investments to achieve the climate-resilient, gender sensitive and socially inclusive blue economy of Bangladesh. Specific objectives of this task are to conduct an analysis for Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) readiness, roadmap, and methodology with recommendations.

• Conducting a Legal, Policy, and Institutional Review to inform on a Blue Economy Governance in Marine Spatial Planning: Assessment of current economic rationale, entities and their institutional roles and responsibilities for BE to identify priority sectors (fisheries, coastal pollution management, and coastal marine tourism for example) for MSP phase 1. Development of recommendations for new institutional scenarios/suggestions to achieve sustainable gender-inclusive BE development: Under this activity, key BE sectors will be identified for analysis and the economic rationale of their significance in the BE agenda. The gap analysis report will be prepared primarily for the consumption of the MoFA, GED, FID, MoFL, MoEFCC, and MoWR. This will facilitate a collective understanding across the line ministries and their subordinate institutions about the key economically significant BE sectors, their roles, and responsibilities - encouraging and, therefore, enabling the enhancement of capacity building to development policies and investments towards robust BE growth.

• Conduct analysis for Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) readiness, roadmap, and methodology with recommendations: The longer-term utility of the proposed TA is creating a pathway for the development Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) framework for Bangladesh using the WB Guidance Note and toolkit for MSP. The first steps for that, according to the WB Note, is identifying local entry points and economic entry points – which will be enabled by the TA’s component 1 and 2, and stakeholder engagements across line ministries. The second step is making the economic and social case to the country for MSP – that the earlier components will allow. Subsequently, selecting and integrating the sectors for the exercise will be enabled through leveraging the earlier components of the TA as well as the learnings from the SCMFP, under which this activity is positioned. In fact, component 3.1 and 3.2 of the proposal shall explore the MSP readiness and methodology for the Fisheries and Coastal Tourism sectors, and Phase 2 of this multi-phase TA aims to explore the rest of the key sectors.

• Based on the outputs of Components 1 and 2, assess the readiness, collect, and consolidate necessary data required to inform an MSP roadmap: This activity under component 3, will leverage the findings of the previous components and assess the readiness of the key sectors for the development of an MSP action plan, through which it will support the BE agenda of the country. The review of the sector and assessment of data availability for the MSP development of the country will allow for data gaps to be identified and thus filled for key sectors of BE development. Collaboration with line ministries and synergy across them will enable capacity building within the government actors and facilitate consolidated planning of multi-sectoral MSP development in the country.

• Based on the readiness assessment and available data, develop and communicate MSP roadmap with institutional roles & responsibilities along with short, medium and long time period: This will help engage multi-sectoral stakeholders to support GoB and inform the Bank on achieving BE for Bangladesh. Also, develop MSP assessment for initially prioritized fisheries and coastal tourism sectors. The readiness assessment report prepared under activity 3.1 will enable stakeholder engagement to make way for the institutionalization of BE agenda and MSP roadmap development, which will be continued into Phase-2. The study will strengthen the institutional capacity on MSP by creating a repository of data that exists, streamlining these data points in ways that ensure their interoperability, and highlighting the data gaps that need to be filled to formulate effective policy mechanisms. The component also ventures into MSP methods and models of fisheries and coastal tourism management sectors as a pilot.

• Awareness building, global knowledge exchange, and client engagement through targeted communication strategy and activities that recognizes and addresses existing the gender disparities in blue sectors: Through consultation, knowledge sharing and dissemination of the report identifying the entities engaged in the key sectors of BE and their institutional analysis, this activity will enhance collective understanding of the sectors’ economic significance, highlight best practices and the scopes for internal and international knowledge exchange and facilitate client engagement to build capacity and policy engagements. Furthermore, the engagement with line ministries will facilitate collective understanding and ownership of the BE agenda within the ministerial actors.