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