Towards a Blue Recovery in Samoa
Appraisal Report
The re-opening of Samoa’s borders in late-2022 kickstarted the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This offers an opportunity to rebuild sustainably its tourism, maritime transport, and fisheries sectors. Samoa’s ocean resources can also augment its resilience to future shocks such as climate change. Through an analysis of Samoa’s economic trends and environmental pressures, institutional set-up and policy tools, as well as financing landscape, this report identifies opportunities and challenges for Samoa’s ocean economy to drive sustainable and resilient development. The Samoa Ocean Strategy offers a blueprint for such a pursuit, but there remain gaps and impediments. To address them, the report provides several cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations to accelerate Samoa’s transition to a sustainable ocean economy.
Governance and policy tools for Samoa’s sustainable ocean economy
The Government of Samoa has crafted an integrated approach to ocean management through the development of the Samoa Ocean Strategy (SOS) and the National Ocean Steering Committee (NOSC). This chapter explores how these elements provide a foundation for policy coherence and co-ordination in pursuit of a sustainable ocean economy. It also elucidates challenges, some stemming from pandemic-related disruptions, which hamper the potential of the SOS and the NOSC. The chapter then situates the SOS and the NOSC in Samoa’s economic, social and environmental context, as well as its broader policy landscape, to assess policy alignment and identify drivers of and roadblocks to successful implementation.