Vision and scenario building for 2035 – Fishing and aquaculture in Romania

Institutul de Prospectiva is supporting the Ministry of Agriculture in Romania in its current efforts to build its sectoral strategy for fishing and aquaculture for the period 2023-2030. The activity is part of an effort involving the World Bank and its partners in supporting the strategic capacity of different ministries in Romania.

The project relies on a foresight methodology that involves a number of co-creation workshops with stakeholders in the sector. The first two workshops in a series of four were organized in April 2022 and were aimed at co-creating a vision for fishing and aquaculture in 2035.

The workshop engaged participants in a seven steps process, as follows:

  • Building a common understanding of the current societal/consumer behaviors and attitudes (level of fish and seafood consumption, types of products consumed, preference for local products, expectations regarding traceability, environmental concerns etc.);
  • Assessing the evolution of societal/consumer expectations by 2035 (on the same parameters as above);
  • Mapping the current fishing and aquaculture system, in terms if strengths and weaknesses;
  • Sketching the inertial future scenario of the fishing and aquaculture sector in Romania, meaning the likely scenario for 2035 in the absence of corrective policy interventions;
  • Identifying future opportunities that would allow the system to progress towards more desirable scenarios than the inertial scenario;
  • Collaboratively developing normative scenarios, capitalizing on selected opportunities;
  • Based on the normative scenarios, extracting the main components of a future vision for 2035, together with the most important areas of transformation leading to such vision.

The results of this co-creation workshops are presented in this report:

Based on these outcomes, stakeholders will be further engaged in two road-mapping workshops to be held in May 2022.