A Round Table on Permitting Challenges & Opportunities for Academia and Collaboration

• February 6, 2026

A dive into the permitting crisis strangling EU-Funded research in the Atlantic

On 30 January 2026, a coalition of practitioners gathered in Gran Canaria for a conversation that would fundamentally challenge how we think about innovation and governance in the Blue Economy. Project managers, engineers, academics, and administrators from across Europe sat around the same table, united by a shared frustration rooted in concrete experience.

The topic was about how permitting delays have become the silent killer of European Blue Economy initiatives. This wasn’t speculation or theoretical concern. It was a full accounting of evidence drawn from genuine project experience, from laboratories to offshore installations, from university campuses to government offices. Five speakers walked through the wreckage of delayed projects, each carrying a story about time lost, momentum killed, and innovation stalled not by scientific failure or technological insufficiency, but by bureaucratic gridlock that seemed designed, perhaps inadvertently, to prevent rather than enable progress.

The PHAROS Project had convened this roundtable with a clear and increasingly urgent mission. Working across marine restoration, renewable energy, climate adaptation, and circular economy development, the project recognized an uncomfortable truth that was beginning to harden into evidence: most EU-funded initiatives designed to address critical challenges in ocean health and Blue Economy development do not fail because the underlying ideas are weak or scientifically unsound. They rather fail because the pathway to realization is fundamentally broken, fragmented across multiple administrative jurisdictions, lacking clear authority structures, and operating according to timelines that bear no relationship to actual project requirements.

The session, hosted by Elba Bueno Cabrera, managerof Clúster Marítimo de Canarias at the venue of Plataforma Oceánica de Canarias (PLOCAN), became an impromptu autopsy of the permitting system itself, conducted by those who knew it most closely. What emerged across the 107-minute discussion was a systematic diagnosis of regulatory architecture that was, frankly, not fit for the purposes to which it was being applied; a system designed for one kind of activity, now being stretched across innovation, research, and pilot-scale demonstration with predictably poor results.

The Scope of the Problem: Evidence from five projects

Before diving into solutions or attempting diagnosis, it is important to understand the scale and specificity of what these organizations face when attempting to operate within European regulatory frameworks. The speakers represented fundamentally different sectors and innovation domains: marine restoration and coastal engineering, agricultural biotechnology, climate resilience and nature-based solutions, offshore aquaculture integration, and renewable energy technology. What they shared, beyond sectoral differences, was a startling uniformity in their core struggles; the bureaucratic obstacles they encountered operated according to principles that transcended industries or technical domains.

Case 1: Marine restoration and artificial reefs

Oscar Aller Rojas, a marine biologist trained in conservation science and equipped with more than a decade of international project management experience, opened the discussion with an overview of the PHAROS project’s ambitious scope and objectives.

The initiative brings together 24 research and implementation partners distributed across multiple European regions and extends into the Arctic, working collaboratively on marine biodiversity restoration across pilot sites in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Spain. Some of the most promising and strategically important work is happening right here in the Canary Islands, with interventions that encompass monitoring sensors, integrated multi-trophic agriculture systems, and artificial reef installations designed to restore marine ecosystems whilst supporting sustainable economic activity.

Here is where permitting becomes genuinely complicated, not in theory but in practical application. Artificial reefs alone require interaction with what appears to be three to four distinct permitting pathways, each originating from different regulatory authorities and operating according to different procedural rules and timelines. You must obtain biodiversity and wildlife sampling permits because the reef structures affect marine species. You must acquire coastal occupation permits (formally CVET or Concesión de Ocupación del Dominio Público Marítimo-Terrestre) for the physical structures themselves, since they occupy public marine space. You must secure fisheries permits for the agricultural component, since integrated multi-trophic agriculture systems interact with both marine capture fisheries and mariculture regulations. This multiplication of permits would present a manageable challenge if these permits were genuinely coordinated through a unified process; yet they are not. Each permit comes from different authorities operating according to distinct mandates and timelines. Some flow from the autonomous communities; others require central government sign-off. All of them must deliver binding opinions, compatibility reports, and environmental assessments that frequently seem to operate at cross-purposes rather than toward coherent objectives.

But here is a fact that stopped multiple participants mid-conversation; according to the most recent analysis of Spanish permitting records that Aller presented, no artificial reef projects have been authorized in Spain since the new artificial reef guidelines were officially adopted in June 2024 and subsequently updated in November 2025. Let that observation rest for a moment. A regulatory framework created explicitly to enable marine restoration is currently authorizing nothing; zero projects; a complete freeze on a category of activity that is strategically aligned with EU environmental and restoration policy. This is not a minor bureaucratic inefficiency. This represents a fundamental failure of permitting architecture to deliver on its intended purpose.

The process for obtaining these permits is, by any objective standard, baroque and extraordinarily complex. There are four major sequential phases in the standard process that Aller walked through methodically. First comes the pre-submission phase, where project teams prepare all documentation, technical reports, environmental impact assessments, and supporting materials; this phase alone can consume months of work. Then you must submit to the autonomous communities, which pass the application through multiple internal review stages; this is not a single review but a series of reviews by different departments or subject matter specialists. The application then moves to central government, which conducts its own assessment according to national-level criteria. It then comes back to the autonomous communities for final coordination. Only then, after this extended journey through multiple administrative layers, do decision-makers issue either approval or rejection. The documentation requirements throughout are staggering, frequently redundant, and occasionally contradictory. One slide showing the process visually made the point indelibly: multiple rounds of revision, dozens of required documents, elaborate layers of stakeholder input, and feedback loops that seemed designed to create maximum friction.

Case 2: Microalgae innovation and the jurisdictional trap

Mariana Carneiro, a chemical engineer with specialization in biological engineering and microalgae optimization, brought to the conversation a textbook example of how regulatory categories become misaligned with technological reality in ways that systematically prevent innovation. Carneiro is managing the REALM project, a Horizon Europe funded initiative that represents, in principle, exactly the kind of circular bioeconomy solution that European sustainability policy explicitly promotes and funds.

The concept is genuinely elegant and ecologically sound: cultivate microalgae next to existing greenhouse facilities, using nutrient-rich drain water from agricultural production as the growth medium. The algae concentrate nutrients in situ and then move to a centralized facility for processing into high-value products. The result is that clean, nutrient-depleted water can be safely discharged; agriculture gets treated effluent suitable for reuse; and high-value biomass enters the processing facility. It is innovation directly aligned with EU Green Deal priorities; it addresses agricultural pollution; it creates circular pathways. It is funded under Horizon Europe because European institutions determined it met the criteria for supporting transformative innovation.

The critical problems emerged immediately when the project moved from laboratory demonstration to real-world facility deployment. Portuguese environmental law classifies microalgae cultivation as “aquaculture,” which is an activity regulated under specific legislative frameworks. Yet REALM needs to operate these cultivation systems on agricultural land, since the whole point of the innovation is to locate the microalgae production immediately adjacent to the greenhouses whose wastewater it processes. Portuguese law, however, explicitly forbids aquaculture activities on agricultural reserves designated for farming. This creates what Carneiro aptly described as a “jurisdictional conflict”: the same activity that is legal and encouraged when performed in one location becomes prohibited when performed in a location that makes the entire innovation work.

There was no legislative precedent for this type of activity because nothing like it had been attempted in Portugal before, which meant that no administrative pathway existed, no decision-making procedure, no set of approval criteria. Hence, noone in the Portuguese administration could answer the fundamental question that should precede all other questions: who has the legal authority to say yes, and under what conditions? The consequence was what Carneiro described as a “ping-pong” between the Regional Development Commission and the Agricultural Reserve authority, with each agency explaining that whilst the activity might be acceptable, it fell within the other authority’s jurisdiction and therefore required their approval first. Neither could comfortably approve it because neither had primary authority. Both kept asking the other to take the lead. Meanwhile, the Portuguese government collapsed, and a caretaker government took over responsibility for public administration. Complex, non-standard projects that did not fit existing procedures were explicitly deprioritized as the temporary government maintained only essential services.

 The demonstration facility’s construction deadline consequently moved past the validation date specified in the grant agreement, creating secondary problems for the project’s formal status with the funder. Worse, because the project involved outdoor biological systems operating according to seasonal patterns, it needed to capture a full annual cycle of operational data; seasonal data alone would be skewed and scientifically unrepresentative. The delay, therefore, did not just push back the project schedule; it threatened the scientific integrity of the results by preventing collection of adequate data across the full environmental cycle.

What makes this case particularly instructive is that the Spanish portion of the REALM project faced far fewer obstacles in pursuing essentially identical innovation. Spain has existing regulatory approaches that allowed the project to classify microalgae cultivation as a “special crop” rather than as aquaculture, which immediately resolved the jurisdictional conflict. The same innovation; the identical technical approach; resulted in dramatically different outcomes depending on which European country hosted the demonstration facility. This stark divergence reveals a crucial institutional insight that the roundtable would return to repeatedly: the problem afflicting European research and innovation is not uniform across the continent. It is fundamentally fragmented. Each member state has created its own regulatory labyrinth according to its own historical experience and legal traditions, and there is minimal harmonization, coordination, or reciprocal recognition across borders. An innovation that works smoothly in one country becomes trapped in regulatory purgatory in another, not because of substantive environmental or safety concerns, but because jurisdictional categories are misaligned.

Case 3: Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) and the administrative bottleneck

Juan Carlos Santamarta, a Full Professor of engineering at the University of La Laguna with more than two decades of applied research experience, brought a perspective that pushed beyond individual project problems to reveal systemic administrative dysfunction. He is co-leading NATALIE, a Horizon Europe project testing nature-based solutions for climate resilience across multiple Mediterranean and Atlantic sites.

The pilots are modest by conventional infrastructure standards; none involves major capital expenditure or permanent landscape alteration. In Fuerteventura, the team is exploring managed aquifer recharge, a water-saving technique that is potentially transformative for island communities facing drought and freshwater scarcity. In La Laguna, they are monitoring and enhancing urban woodlands for flood prevention during extreme precipitation events. In Maspalomas, they are testing filtration systems that remove contaminants before water reaches environmentally sensitive coastal aquifers. These are exactly the kind of low-impact, learning-oriented, reversible pilots that should move quickly through permitting processes.

Santamarta opened his presentation with an arresting observation that cut through layers of technical detail to identify the core problem; he stated directly that the biggest delays confronting the NATALIE project were not scientific in nature, they were administrative in character. He identified four recurring problems that emerged across all pilot sites, though in different combinations: first, permits consistently take longer than anticipated in project timelines; second, an implausibly large number of distinct institutions are involved in the approval process, with no clear hierarchy or coordination; third, baseline environmental data needed to begin pilot work is extraordinarily difficult to access, held in scattered locations, managed by different agencies according to different protocols; fourth, the public offices that must review and approve projects are overloaded with work, under-resourced in personnel, and unable to process applications within reasonable timelines. These are not exotic or unusual barriers encountered by a single problematic project; they are systemic failures embedded in how European administrative systems currently process environmental and research applications.

The real-world consequences of these delays are visceral and concrete rather than abstract. When a permit arrives late in the Canary Islands context, the problem is not simply that paperwork is delayed; it is that the research window has closed. When fieldwork depends on the rainy season, and the permit arrives in month three of a four-month rainy season, you have lost your opportunity. You have missed the field campaign window during which the phenomenon you wanted to study actually occurs. The team cannot simply reschedule to the following month; the following months are dry. If you have international research teams that have flown from the mainland or from other European countries, booked accommodation, arranged their schedules, you have now wasted travel budgets, burned through project contingency funds, created cascading delays for dependent work packages, and generated pressure to reschedule work in ways that distort the scientific design. Data collection becomes compressed and compromised. The research loses quality.

Maspalomas provided a particularly instructive example, since the main permitting issue was straightforward and ought to have been resolvable quickly; the project needed monitoring access to a groundwater filtration system in a coastal area. Yet the hardest part was not the wait itself but rather not knowing when the process would end. For monitoring work that depends on seasonal cycles and international team coordination, Santamarta stressed emphatically, uncertainty is toxic; it poisons project management because you cannot schedule research teams, cannot book equipment, cannot plan campaigns, cannot coordinate with partners when you do not know whether permits will arrive. The administration was not hostile; it was simply overloaded and unable to commit to clear timelines.

Fuerteventura presented an entirely different administrative nightmare, one that illuminated problems beyond timeline insufficiency. Managed aquifer recharge has no local precedent in the Canary Islands; it is a technique that has worked elsewhere but not in this specific context, so there is genuine scientific and technical uncertainty about performance and impacts. When there is no local precedent, the regulatory process becomes “extra cautious,” as Santamarta put it, more risk-averse than the underlying environmental and technical considerations would seem to warrant. Water councils must align with public institutions, which must coordinate with health agencies, which must consult with environmental authorities. Each of these agencies has legitimate concerns rooted in their specific mandates and responsibilities. The problem is not that they are obstinate; the problem is that there is no clear leadership structure, no designated authority responsible for coordinating the overall process. “If nobody leads the whole chain,” Santamarta observed with quiet precision, “everything moves slowly.”

He identified another hidden administrative problem that, while less visible than timeline delays, is equally consequential: baseline data fragmentation. For any environmental pilot or monitoring project, you need existing baseline information on rainfall patterns, groundwater levels, water quality indicators, historical land use. This data exists somewhere in the public record; it has been collected by various government agencies over years. But it is scattered across different offices, maintained in different data formats, governed by different access protocols and metadata systems. The research team essentially starts its work by spending weeks or even months reconstructing the baseline through detective work, gathering data from multiple sources, harmonizing it into a coherent dataset, filling gaps where possible. This exhausting preliminary work, necessary for establishing valid scientific baselines, depletes resources and attention before the actual research begins. It weakens the pilot from day one by consuming time and budget that should be allocated to innovation and learning.

Case 4: Offshore multi-use aquaculture and the permitting cascade

Javier Roo brought the perspective of someone straddling two worlds; he is a marine scientist trained in applied oceanography and ecosystem management who currently works within the Government of the Canary Islands in an administrative capacity whilst also serving as project manager for AquaWind, a European initiative that attempts something genuinely novel in the offshore multi-use space. This is not simply wind energy or simply aquaculture; it is both simultaneously integrated on a single platform.

Most previous multi-use offshore platforms combine wind energy with lower-trophic level organisms like mussels or seaweed; AquaWind adds fish farming to the equation, which is a first for this type of integrated system and represents an additional step toward food security in a Europe that currently imports more than 70 percent of its marine protein.

Here is the critical insight Roo shared, one that would become central to understanding the broader permitting crisis: when you pursue multi-use activities, you do not merely double your permitting challenges; you create an exponential multiplication of bureaucratic requirements. A single-activity project faces a certain quantity and complexity of regulatory barriers; call this quantity X. A genuinely multi-use project, one that integrates offshore wind and fish farming on a single platform, faces something closer to three to four times X in total burden, since each activity layer brings its own set of regulatory requirements, its own approval pathways, its own documentation needs, and then these various requirements interact in ways that the permitting system was not designed to accommodate or coordinate.

AquaWind required permits spanning multiple administrative levels and governance structures. At the regional level, administered by the Canary Islands autonomous community, the project needed approval of an experimental and technical project design, documentation of environmental monitoring protocols (mandatory for any aquaculture activity), comprehensive escape and recovery plans (in case the fish farming component fails and organisms escape into the wild), and livestock registration for the aquaculture operation itself. At the national level, the project required authorization from the Ministry of Ecological Transition for the multi-use designation of the area, formal assessment of marine strategies compatibility (required under EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive), approvals from aviation and safety authorities (because of the wind turbines), and, late in the process, special permits for vessel operations. The testing area sits just 100 meters outside the interior waters boundary of the Canary Islands; standard aquaculture vessels operating in Spanish territorial waters can navigate interior waters freely, but exterior waters operate under different regulatory regimes, which meant that the vessel operations Roo needed to conduct for fish farming were not automatically permitted and required separate approval.

Each permit came from a different agency, operated according to its own internal procedures, maintained its own timeline expectations. Roo submitted his first application in February 2023 and received complete authorization on 22 April 2024, which represents a total of 14 months for all permits to be consolidated and approved. The project had initially planned for 12 months of permitting, so the two-month overage does not sound catastrophic in isolation. But the project timeline was 36 months in total; the first year was consumed almost entirely by permitting processes. The innovation work itself, the demonstration of multi-use systems, the collection of operational data, the learning that justifies European funding, could not really begin until year two. This represents a fundamental misalignment between how European research funding operates and how permitting systems function.

Case 5: Offshore wind energy and the grid connection gridlock

Pedro Mayorga, founder and CEO of EnerOcean and lead for the Primavera project, presented what might be the most cautionary and revealing case study of the entire roundtable. His company has developed the W2Power platform, a floating wind technology incorporating dual wind turbines on a single floater.

Now, through the Primavera project supported by European funding, he is attempting to deploy an 11-megawatt full-scale demonstration unit in Canary Islands port waters. The decision to locate testing in port waters rather than open ocean was strategically sound; proximity to shore reduces operational complexity, simplifies maintenance logistics, minimizes cable connection distances. The Canary Islands possess excellent wind resources and consistent atmospheric conditions favorable for energy generation.

The platform will contribute materially to port decarbonization and will serve as an innovation training and research center for marine renewable energy development. The project sounds straightforward in conception; it is extraordinarily complicated in execution.

Mayorga started his company and initiated this research direction in 2021. By early 2025, he had completed the environmental permit application. Four years had elapsed from project inception to submitting the environmental documentation. Why such an extended timeline? Because permitting offshore wind energy in Spanish territorial waters requires a comprehensive environmental study that cannot be simplified or streamlined without incurring substantial risks. Attempting to shortcut the process by pursuing a simplified assessment creates danger of forced revision into what is termed the “ordinary” environmental assessment category, which often doubles the overall timeline. The comprehensive environmental study required for offshore wind is extraordinarily complex and expensive; Mayorga estimated that comparable environmental studies for similar-capacity offshore wind systems deployed onshore cost roughly one-tenth what the marine permitting study cost. Part of this expense differential is intrinsic to marine operations: working at sea involves logistical complexity, costly specialist expertise, equipment limitations. But much of the cost derives from regulatory requirements that may be ecologically justified but are practically very onerous.

The regulations require a full year of bird migration observation campaigns to establish baseline data on bird species movement patterns, transit frequencies, seasonal variations. These ecological data are genuinely important for understanding potential impacts of offshore infrastructure on avifauna; they are also extremely time-consuming to collect. Mayorga completed the required bird surveys and generated the necessary data documenting migration patterns and potential transits around the proposed platform location. Necessary documentation? Arguably yes, from an ecological perspective; one can justify the requirement on environmental grounds. Aligned with European research project timelines? Absolutely not, one year of environmental baseline data collection represents a major component of total project timeline.

Beyond bird surveys, Mayorga engaged extensively with the local fishing community, not because regulations formally require it, but because sustainable coexistence with existing economic uses of marine space is not only ethically necessary but practically essential. The initial proposal suggested leaving a corridor for fishing vessels to transit through the deployment zone. Fishermen rejected this approach; they judged it too risky for their vessels and operations. Rather than override their concerns, Mayorga adapted the platform design, adding redundant mooring lines to increase structural safety margins and reduce risk profiles for nearby vessels. This was not a regulatory requirement; it emerged from community engagement and reflected good business practice, stakeholder accountability, and genuine sustainability principles. It also added cost, complexity, and extended timelines.

But the actual gridlock came from electricity grid infrastructure, a problem that reveals how permitting failures cascade across linked systems. The Canary Islands operate a closed electrical system with essentially fixed total capacity; the islands are not connected to the broader European grid and cannot import electricity from the mainland. An 11-megawatt installation, even on an island system theoretically providing 500 megawatts, creates measurable strain. Mayorga needed to secure grid connection authorization to export the energy his platform generates. The distribution network initially appeared to have available capacity at 20 kilovolts. More detailed assessment revealed that the transport network, which moves energy at higher voltage levels across the islands, had no spare capacity. Mayorga paid substantial financial guarantees to secure a connection slot. Everything then stalled. The slot remained blocked, unresolved, until January 2025, when permissions finally cleared.

This created an absurd administrative situation. After four years of work on environmental studies, bird surveys, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory navigation, Mayorga faced a compressed timeline. He had six months to revise the environmental permit to incorporate the grid connection requirements he had just learned. He completed that revision in two months, an extraordinary effort. He then had six months to receive approval. He received it two days before the deadline. The rhythm of this process bears no relationship to actual project management or reality; it represents administration operating according to its own internal logic and constraints rather than in response to coherent external requirements.

The Pattern Emerges: Fragmentation, scale mismatch, and fear

What becomes systematically clear across all five detailed case studies is that permitting failures are not random mishaps or individual bureaucratic inefficiencies. They represent systemic problems embedded in how regulatory architectures have developed across European administrative systems. Several coherent patterns repeat consistently across different sectors, different countries, and different types of innovation.

First, fragmentation without meaningful coordination. Each major project confronts between three and four distinct types of permits, each originating from different administrative authorities operating according to different mandates, legal frameworks, and procedural timelines. There is no single contact point. No coordinating authority. No one entity with mandate to speak for all relevant agencies or with authority to establish unified timelines. Applications bounce between regional and national levels, between environmental agencies and sector-specific ministries, between terrestrial and maritime authorities. Multi-agency signoffs create sequential delays where every individual approval takes weeks, and then project managers discover the next agency in the chain needs something different, requires different documentation, has different priorities, which necessitates revision, resubmission, and another waiting period. This is not deliberate obstruction; it is administrative fragmentation that has no mechanism for integration.

Second, scale mismatches between pilot projects and regulatory frameworks. Regulations designed for large, permanent, commercial-scale infrastructure get applied mechanically and automatically to small research pilots. A one-tonne fish farm pilot undergoes the same formal technical and economic assessment required for a 5,000-tonne commercial operation targeting market production. The same documentation. The same impact assessment pathway. The same timeline assumptions. This is fundamentally non-proportionate. It is administratively expensive for both the applicant and the reviewing authority, and it is unnecessarily restrictive for learning-phase projects where the entire purpose is to gather data and knowledge before scaling to commercial levels.

Third, innovation cannot fit into existing regulatory boxes. When something is genuinely novel, when it represents true technological or methodological innovation, the regulatory system has no established category for it. There is no box to tick. No precedent to follow. No parallel case in the regulatory literature. Thus,applications enter bureaucratic limbo, bouncing between authorities, each asking “is this actually my responsibility?” The precautionary principle, well-intentioned and grounded in legitimate environmental protection concerns, becomes paralyzing. Rather than asking the operationally sensible question: “Is there significant probability of significant harm?” regulators ask the philosophically perfectionist question: “Can we be absolutely certain there is no possibility of harm?” These are very different questions. The first represents proportionate risk assessment appropriate for decision-making. The second represents regulatory perfectionism that, while protective, prevents any activity that carries any conceivable risk.

Fourth, administrative capacity is genuinely insufficient for workload. This is not deliberate obstruction by hostile civil servants. Public administration bodies are not trying to prevent innovation. They are simply under-resourced and overwhelmed. When a project submits complex technical documentation requiring specialist expertise to evaluate, reviewing authorities have limited capacity to process it quickly. Even when goodwill exists, and Santamarta emphasized that many administrators are genuinely willing to help and cooperative, the system simply cannot keep pace. Hiring civil servants takes time. Procurement of additional resources takes time. Existing staff are already busy with current workload. The system operates in a state of chronic understaffing relative to application volume.

Fifth, timelines are unpredictable and fundamentally misaligned with project reality. Projects wait indefinitely without clear information about when decisions will emerge, and then suddenly face compressed deadlines that seem arbitrary and unreasonable. Mayorga waited years for environmental assessment, then received the permit approval two days before the absolute deadline after being told he had six months to revise documentation. The rhythm of administrative processing does not match project management requirements or grant agreement constraints. Projects operate under fixed timelines set by funding agreements; missing a milestone means missing validation gates, which can jeopardize funding and create secondary failures that cascade through the project.

The Real Cost: Beyond delay

These are not mere inconveniences or administrative frustrations; the consequences are concrete, measurable, and strategically significant.

For REALM, the 24-month delay in Portugal meant the project could not capture full-year biological data; seasonal data alone would be skewed and scientifically unrepresentative. The project’s ecological conclusions and technical findings are consequently potentially compromised by insufficient data. The funding pathway became precarious; the funder had to decide whether to accept delayed deliverables or enforce contract provisions. Mitigation measures had to be implemented to prevent the delay from propagating throughout other project work packages, which consumed resources that should have been allocated to research and innovation.

For NATALIE, missed permit windows meant missed seasons. Research teams flew from distant locations at substantial cost and could not conduct planned fieldwork; accommodation costs, and team time were wasted because the administrative process did not align with the research window. International researchers faced disruption to their schedules and damage to their research plans. The project’s scientific validity suffered, incomplete seasonal data leads to incomplete understanding of climate system dynamics.

For AquaWind, the first year became consumed entirely by administrative permitting. Whilst the project was running down the clock on administrative approvals, parallel technical and scientific work stalled. The innovation itself, demonstrating that multi-use offshore systems can operate safely and productively, could not be tested and validated on schedule. The demonstration component of the project, which is the entire point of EU funding support, was delayed.

For Primavera, four years of development, environmental study, stakeholder engagement, and technological refinement had to be compressed into increasingly tight final timelines. Risk increased substantially. The project is now delivering under extreme time pressure, which creates performance pressure and reduces the quality of learning outcomes.

And across all projects, there is a pervasive and chilling effect that extends beyond the specific cases discussed. How many researchers and company founders do not even attempt EU-funded innovation because they have heard the permitting horror stories? How many genuinely transformative ideas never make it past the proposal stage because entrepreneurs lack the financial stamina and institutional endurance to navigate a five-year permitting gauntlet? How many innovations that could address critical environmental and climate challenges simply do not get attempted because the pathway is too daunting?

The Fragmentation Problem: Autonomous communities, central government, and nobody in charge

One of the sharpest insights came from Oscar Aller’s opening presentation and was reinforced throughout the discussion: Spain, like many other European member states, has undergone a significant transition of administrative powers and regulatory authority from central government to autonomous communities. This is a positive development for regional governance, for subsidiarity, for democratic legitimacy at levels closer to citizens. But the process is incomplete; competences are now split, often ambiguously, between regional and national levels, and there is no clear allocation of responsibility for coordinating activity across these levels.

For permitting purposes, this fragmentation creates chaos. Biodiversity permits might originate from and be issued by the autonomous community environmental authority. Coastal permits might require central government sign-off because they involve national maritime jurisdiction. Fisheries permissions might involve both levels, with the autonomous community regulating local fishing practices and central government setting broader national frameworks. No single authority owns the entire permitting process. No one can say with clarity and certainty: “Here is your timeline. Here is exactly what we need. Here is when you will receive a decision.” Instead, applications move between levels, each authority reviewing from its institutional perspective, sometimes reaching conclusions that contradict the other, creating delays as these conflicts are negotiated and resolved.

Javier Roo, speaking from his administrative position within Spanish government, acknowledged the depth and difficulty of this challenge. The competences for environmental assessment, agriculture, energy, and fisheries are distributed across multiple ministries at the national level and multiple departments at the regional level. Technically, a genuine one-stop shop is possible; the authority exists to create it. Practically, it is extraordinarily difficult to implement because legal authority itself is fragmented. An agency cannot make decisions outside its mandated scope, and when scope is ambiguous or divided, coordination becomes acutely difficult.

Spain has introduced mechanisms attempting to address this challenge. There is a “strategic projects” mechanism whereby projects of national importance can be designated as strategic, with the theory that administrative timelines are reduced by half and permitting is accelerated. In practice, as noted by Gordon, the environmental consultant and strategic projects specialist who participated in discussion, the mechanism has had surprisingly minimal impact. To truly unlock the benefits, projects must pursue an additional legal designation: “General Interest Project,” which requires full project approval and comprehensive environmental impact assessment. Once that additional designation is achieved, doors do open; barriers dissolve; the administration finds ways to cooperate and expedite. But the initial strategic project designation alone does not substantially help. The system appears designed to require multiple layers of designation before delivering benefits, which itself undermines the purpose of fast-tracking.

The Environmental Assessment Paradox

One of the most illuminating exchanges during the roundtable involved the precautionary principle and how it operates in environmental assessment processes. The precautionary principle is written explicitly into European environmental law, and it serves a legitimate purpose: preventing unknown environmental harms by requiring assessment of potential risks before activities are permitted. In the context of well-understood industrial activities, this works reasonably well. Environmental consultants know what to assess because the activity has been performed elsewhere and effects are understood. Regulators know what to check because precedent and scientific literature clarify the important parameters. Timelines are relatively predictable because processes are established and well-understood.

But for research pilots and genuinely novel innovations, the precautionary principle becomes a cage that prevents progress. Pedro Mayorga articulated the tension sharply and with some frustration; environmental permitting legislation is designed to be “very cautious of not making anything wrong,” which is defensible from one perspective. But when innovation projects undergo review, “the legislation has the routine to learn”; it is designed for established activities, not for projects that are testing whether a technology can work safely in a new context. These represent fundamentally different risk profiles. A large commercial offshore wind farm represents known technology and known risks. A small, reversible research platform testing new technology at reduced scale represents a different proposition entirely.

Mayorga proposed a conceptual distinction that the roundtable found broadly convincing: differentiate between “significant harm” and theoretical risk. A small research pilot operating with comprehensive monitoring poses minimal risk of significant harm. Rather than asking the perfectionist question: “Can we be absolutely certain there is no possibility of any harm?” regulators might ask the operational question: “Is there significant probability of significant harm?” If the answer is no, and if rigorous monitoring is in place, the project proceeds. This is not deregulation or recklessness. It is proportionate assessment appropriate to actual risk profiles.

The concept has precedent and institutional validation. An environmental consultant named Maile mentioned that Scotland implemented a genuine one-stop shop for marine development permitting roughly thirty years previously, consolidating multiple departmental reviews into a single streamlined process. That consolidation worked; it eliminated chaos. The same solution is arguably needed now for research projects; a unified permitting pathway specifically designed for research, demonstrating projects, and innovations. It is technically feasible. It requires political will to implement; it requires recognition that research projects are different from commercial development and deserve different treatment.

European regions attempting to implement one-stop shops have discovered that single-agency systems work quite well for single-use activities like wind energy alone or wave energy alone or artificial reef installation. They become exponentially more complex for multi-use platforms, where one platform simultaneously involves wind, aquaculture, and marine spatial considerations, because you cannot consolidate activities under a single regulatory lens when they are governed by genuinely different statutory frameworks.

The Data Problem

A theme that emerged from Juan Carlos Santamarta’s presentation and received insufficient attention in policy discussion, but which carries substantial practical consequence, is baseline environmental data fragmentation. Research pilots need existing environmental data: rainfall records spanning multiple years, groundwater level measurements at high temporal resolution, water quality testing results, historical land use patterns. This information exists; it has been collected by various public bodies over years and decades. Yet it is scattered across different government offices, different administrative units, different departments and agencies. Different offices collect according to different protocols. Different systems store data according to different formats and specifications. Different governance frameworks apply to data access and sharing; some data is freely available, other data is restricted, data licensing is inconsistent.

A research team that needs to establish environmental baselines essentially must conduct detective work: contact various public agencies, request data through whatever access procedures apply, receive data in different formats, spend weeks or months harmonizing datasets, filling gaps where measurements are missing, combining information from multiple partial sources into coherent baseline datasets. This exhausting preliminary work, which is necessary for establishing valid scientific baselines, consumes time and budget that should be allocated to the actual research and innovation. It weakens research from day one.

Santamarta proposed a solution that is straightforward in concept but challenging in implementation: establish a centralized platform for environmental baseline data with standardized data formats, accessible to all researchers and project managers without bureaucratic friction. This would accelerate pilot start-up and improve research quality by eliminating the wasteful data-hunting phase. It requires administrative coordination that currently does not exist; different agencies would need to upload data to a unified platform, accept standardized metadata and format requirements, and agree on data sharing policies. Politically, it is feasible; administratively, it requires coordination infrastructure that has not been created.

Solutions on the Table: From Theory to Practice

By the discussion and question-and-answer portion of the roundtable, several concrete solutions had emerged from speaker presentations and were being discussed and refined.

One-Stop Shops and Regulatory Sandboxes

Multiple speakers advocated for centralized permitting systems, either as traditional one-stop shops operating through established administrative infrastructure or as regulatory sandboxes providing dedicated frameworks for innovation. The concept is straightforward: a project enters a single portal or contact point, receives clear guidance on all required permits, knows with reasonable clarity what the timeline will be, and has one coordinating individual or office responsible for managing the process across all relevant agencies. This coordinating function is critical because it means someone has mandate and responsibility to speak for all agencies, to coordinate between them, to ensure their requirements do not contradict, and to keep the process moving forward.

For this to function effectively, it needs legal grounding and institutional support. The coordinating authority must have mandate to speak for other agencies; this must be established in legislation or regulation. Timelines must be specified in advance; agencies must commit to those timelines or establish clear mechanisms for requesting extensions. For single-use projects like wind energy or artificial reefs, this is operationally feasible. For multi-use initiatives where wind and aquaculture interact, the coordination challenge becomes more complex because you are coordinating between genuinely distinct regulatory regimes.

There is legal precedent suggesting movement in the right direction. Spain is currently drafting a new Science Law to replace legislation from 2003; the current law has not been updated substantially for more than two decades, and it does not address contemporary research realities or EU research funding structures. One of the proposed additions in the draft Science Law is specific regulatory provisions designed to accommodate R&D projects with external funding at regional, national, or European levels. The draft includes provisions for innovation “sandboxes” or test zones, designated regulatory spaces where research can proceed with streamlined oversight in exchange for rigorous monitoring, data transparency, and reversibility. If enacted, this provision would be genuinely transformative, creating legal authorization for fast-tracked permitting of approved research projects.

The EU Nature Restoration Law, enacted recently and requiring all European member states to develop restoration plans by specific deadlines, is similarly creating administrative momentum. If marine restoration becomes a national priority with legally mandated implementation deadlines, permitting frameworks for restoration projects can be fast-tracked and streamlined. This is how systemic change typically occurs, legislative priorities at the EU level cascade into member state regulatory adaptation.

Risk-Based Environmental Assessment Matrices

Oscar Aller referenced academic research conducted by colleagues at the University of Swansea that analyzed marine restoration permitting systems globally, reviewing permit requirements and interviewing marine restoration practitioners across multiple countries. The research found consistent recurring barriers: permitting is slow; authority is unclear; requirements are onerous. But it also identified an emerging and promising solution: development of risk-based assessment matrices specifically for coastal and marine restoration projects. The concept operationalizes risk assessment; marine restoration projects are categorized by environmental impact potential, ranging from low to high, based on specific objective criteria. These criteria include location (is the project in an already-modified environment or pristine habitat?); methods used (are these established, commonly deployed methods or novel techniques?); whether methods are adapted locally or imported without modification; and baseline environmental conditions.

Low-impact projects, those using established methods in suitable locations with comprehensive monitoring, can follow a simplified but rigorous fast-track approval process. This is not deregulation or environmental corner-cutting; it is proportionate regulation where the rigor of assessment matches the actual risk profile. Applicants and administrators alike understand this framework in advance; it provides clarity.

Australian environmental researchers have developed specific matrices adapted to the Australian context. These could be adapted to Spanish, European, and Mediterranean contexts. The advantage is that regulators have a clear decision framework built on objective criteria. Applicants know upfront which impact category their project falls into and what process applies. The system is transparent and predictable rather than arbitrary.

Dedicated support structures for EU projects

Several speakers, particularly Juan Carlos Santamarta, highlighted that EU-funded research operates according to rules, timelines, and governance structures that differ substantially from standard commercial projects or traditional government spending. Administrations reviewing projects often lack deep familiarity with how EU funding works, what constraints projects face, why certain decisions need to be made on specific timelines. This knowledge gap creates friction; administrators apply standard procedures designed for other contexts to projects that operate according to different principles.

Santamarta proposed establishing a centralized office within each autonomous community, or for larger regions like the Canary Islands, a dedicated administrative unit specifically responsible for supporting EU-funded projects through permitting. This office would provide a single contact point for projects, would coordinate permitting across authorities, would understand EU project requirements and constraints, would help projects navigate regulatory requirements by providing institutional knowledge, and would facilitate communication between projects and administrations. The coordinator would understand grant agreement requirements, project timelines, deliverable deadlines, and the consequences of missed milestones. This office would essentially serve as an institutional translator and facilitator.

Mariana Carneiro proposed a related but distinct concept: establish a regulatory “sandbox” or “umbrella” framework where research projects could operate with regulatory flexibility as long as they met strict criteria. The criteria would include: no permanent environmental damage; complete data sharing and transparency; real-time monitoring with public access to monitoring results; reversibility of any interventions; and commitment to learning sharing. Under these conditions, the administration gains learning value and maintains environmental oversight whilst the project proceeds without standard permitting delays. This is not permission to ignore environmental concerns; it is recognition that research pilots have different risk profiles and different purposes than commercial deployment.

Fee systems to fund civil service capacity

Pedro Mayorga made a pragmatic but potentially controversial proposal that emerged from his experience with environmental permitting costs. Current environmental permitting is free to the applicant; there are no application fees. Meantime, public administration charged with reviewing applications is chronically under-resourced and overwhelmed. Applications pile up; timelines extend; the system becomes clogged. What if modest fees were imposed on environmental assessment applications, with all proceeds dedicated specifically to funding expanded civil service capacity for reviewing environmental assessments?

This is not equivalent to paying for faster processing, which would create moral hazard where wealthy projects could buy expedited review. Rather, it is funding mechanism to ensure the administration has personnel and resources proportionate to workload. If an office receives five hundred applications and has staffing adequate for one hundred applications, all permitting becomes glacially slow. If fees on applications generate resources to hire qualified additional staff, administrative capacity expands to meet demand. Mayorga acknowledged this approach is “a little capitalistic” and might seem unusual in European administrative contexts, but from a practical standpoint, it addresses a genuine and structural bottleneck.

Expanding administrative capacity does not require eliminating environmental protection; it requires ensuring the protection mechanisms have adequate resources to function well.

Harmonized legislation across member states

Mariana Carneiro’s experience with REALM demonstrated the perverse consequences of regulatory fragmentation across the European Union. The same microalgae innovation faced paralyzing barriers and delays in Portugal because legislative categories did not accommodate it yet proceeded smoothly in Spain because different regulatory approaches offered flexibility. This creates a situation where the same EU-funded innovation has dramatically different permitting experiences depending on which member state hosts the demonstration facility. It essentially means European innovation policy has no unified framework; success or failure depends on which country gets selected.

Carneiro proposed that EU-level harmonization of definitions and regulatory categories for emerging agricultural biotechnologies would prevent projects from being trapped in one jurisdiction whilst entirely feasible in another. This is genuinely challenging because agricultural policy has remained largely within member state authority; there is no comprehensive EU agricultural code. But for EU-funded innovations explicitly designed to support EU environmental and climate transition objectives, harmonization would serve strategic European interests.

Pre-identified marine restoration and innovation zones

Oscar Aller proposed that marine restoration zones be identified and designated within existing marine spatial planning frameworks at the national level. Rather than requiring each restoration project to navigate individual permitting from scratch, pre-identified restoration zones could have streamlined permitting pathways already established. These zones would be specifically selected to minimize conflicts with other ocean uses like fishing, shipping lanes, or energy production. They would function as testing grounds where marine innovations can be deployed, monitored, and evaluated. Projects demonstrating success within designated zones could then scale to commercial deployment.

This shifts the regulatory approach fundamentally; instead of the current system where each individual novel project must negotiate from a position of regulatory non-recognition, the system would pre-authorize categories of activity within designated zones. Innovation could proceed within those zones without project-by-project permitting; learning would accumulate; successful approaches could then move to commercial deployment.

Administration perspective: Capability, not obstruction

One important corrective and reality check came from Javier Roo speaking from his dual perspective as both a project manager and someone working within Spanish government. He emphasized clearly that civil servants are not deliberately obstructing innovation out of hostility or institutional inertia. They are operating under legal constraints, staffing limitations, legitimate uncertainties about responsibility, and, critically, legal accountability for their decisions. When a project is genuinely novel, something that has not been permitted or assessed before, administrators face real difficulty and real risk. They have legal responsibility for their decisions; if they approve something that causes environmental harm or creates public liability, they bear responsibility and may face legal consequences.

This legal accountability, while sometimes creating friction with projects that want expedited review, also ensures careful consideration of actual risks and consequences. The solution is not for administrators to ignore concerns or lower standards; it is to provide administrators with better legal frameworks, clearer authority structures, and adequate resources to do competent review.

Roo also noted that strategic project designation, while currently underutilized and perhaps insufficiently powerful, represents movement in the right direction. As legislation evolves, particularly as the draft Science Law is implemented, administrative tools will improve and adapt.

An environmental consultant and specialist in strategic projects named Maile contributed another important perspective. Thirty years previously, environmental permitting was genuinely chaotic across Europe; different environmental permits came from different offices; coordination was minimal. Then one-stop shops were created; multiple departmental reviews were consolidated into unified processes. Environmental permitting became more coherent and efficient. The same solution is needed now for research projects and innovation pilots. It is technically feasible; it has historical precedent; it requires political will to implement.

Why This Matters: Beyond bureaucracy

At the core, this permitting crisis is not fundamentally about administrative efficiency or even about the frustrations of project managers trying to navigate confusing systems. It is about Europe’s capacity to innovate and respond to urgent environmental and climate challenges. The Canary Islands and broader Atlantic coast regions are genuinely leading in Blue Economy development and marine innovation. But if permitting delays consume one-third of project timelines, if innovations get trapped in jurisdictional conflicts, if bureaucratic requirements become so onerous that entrepreneurs and researchers decline to attempt risky innovation, the innovation rate declines substantially.

The paradox is sharp and consequential: the European Union has established explicit policy priorities around Blue Economy, marine restoration, climate adaptation, and circular economy development. The EU has created substantial funding mechanisms to support innovation in these areas. Yet the administrative framework through which these priorities are implemented systematically frustrates their realization. An institution has set the goal, funded the innovation, but fail to design the permitting system to enable it. Projects that are strategically aligned with EU Green Deal objectives, that are funded under Horizon Europe because they meet criteria for transformative innovation, face permitting delays that would not be imposed on routine commercial development.

Climate resilience cannot wait for perfect regulatory certainty and complete environmental consensus. Ocean restoration cannot pause indefinitely whilst bureaucracies work toward institutional alignment. Offshore renewable energy cannot be indefinitely delayed because grid connection procedures were not designed for small-scale testing and demonstration. Neither can innovation in microalgae cultivation, nature-based solutions, or aquaculture systems. The delays discussed at the roundtable are not hypothetical inconveniences; they represent lost time in a world where climate change operates according to calendars that do not negotiate with administrative processes.

This is not a case for abandonment of environmental protection or for permitting to become a rubber stamp of approval. It is a case for intelligent regulatory design that ensures environmental protection occurs, that precaution operates proportionately to actual risk rather than theoretical risk, that assessment rigor matches project scale and innovation stage, and that timelines are predictable rather than arbitrary. It is a case for recognizing that research pilots and commercial projects are different and deserve different treatment. It is a case for ensuring that institutional capacity to review permits matches application volume and complexity.

Toward Resolution: A policy agenda emerging from evidence

By the end of the roundtable discussion and closing remarks, a coherent policy agenda was beginning to crystallize from the experiences and evidence presented. The PHAROS project has committed to producing a comprehensive policy brief that will synthesize this evidence and present recommendations to European institutions and member state governments. Several recommendations emerged with clarity from the discussion.

First, it is necessary to establish genuinely fast-track permitting pathways specifically for low-impact research pilots; this requires clear, objective definition of what constitutes low-impact; requires absolute commitment to environmental monitoring; but must enable deployment with streamlined assessment rather than full commercial-scale permitting. Second, create designated regulatory sandboxes or marine restoration zones with streamlined permitting already established, enabling innovation within identified spaces without project-by-project negotiation. Third, implement genuine one-stop shops specifically designed for EU-funded projects, where a single contact point coordinates between authorities, provides clear information upfront, establishes predictable timelines, and speaks for the relevant agencies.

Fourth, harmonize EU legislation on emerging technologies so that innovations do not become trapped in one jurisdiction whilst being feasible elsewhere; this requires EU-level action but would serve strategic European interests. Fifth, develop risk-based environmental assessment matrices; differentiate projects by actual impact level; apply proportionate assessment rather than uniform rigorous review to all projects. Sixth, establish dedicated EU project support offices at regional or national levels; provide administrative navigation support; build institutional knowledge about EU project requirements. Seventh, fund administrative capacity appropriately; implement fee systems, dedicated budgets, or other mechanisms to ensure civil service capacity matches application volume and complexity.

Eighth, update and clarify national laws on research, innovation, and small-scale pilots; ensure legal frameworks explicitly accommodate research-stage projects; create regulatory provisions for innovation; this is the direction Spain is moving with the draft Science Law. These are not radical or ideologically motivated proposals; they are pragmatic recommendations that preserve environmental protection, acknowledge legitimate regulatory concerns, and simply ask whether systems can be designed where innovation in the public interest is not strangled by procedural gridlock.

Conclusion: The need for speed aligned with responsibility

The most cogent and perhaps most powerful statement from the entire roundtable discussion came from Pedro Mayorga, articulated after describing his multi-year experience with environmental permitting. After walking through four years of permitting for an 11-megawatt research installation, after describing the compression of timelines and the arbitrary nature of deadlines, he observed simply: “We need a system that can move at the speed of reality.”

This observation captures the core of the issue with piercing clarity. Environmental protection is important; precaution has genuine value; careful assessment of potential consequences before deploying innovations is responsible governance. But paralysis is not precaution; it is paralysis. When research projects consume one-third of their timeline on permitting; when demonstration facilities miss seasonal windows because permits arrive late; when genuinely transformative innovations are abandoned because the bureaucratic pathway is too daunting; when one jurisdiction enables an innovation and another prevents it; when administrations lack capacity to assess what they are legally bound to review; when timelines shift arbitrarily and deadlines compress without warning. This represents systemic failure of institutional design.

The solutions exist and have been identified; some are regulatory in character (sandboxes, fast tracks, designated zones); some are institutional in nature (one-stop shops, support offices, dedicated staff); some are legal (updated science laws, EU harmonization); some are financial (fee systems to fund capacity). The PHAROS project’s roundtable laid out evidence from multiple projects and sectors, mapped the problems with precision, and identified clear pathways forward.

Now comes implementation. The policy brief will carry this evidence to policymakers and decision-makers. But implementation requires political will; it requires ministries coordinating across administrative silos; it requires governing institutions accepting that innovation requires regulatory flexibility aligned with actual risk rather than theoretical anxiety. It requires administrations being given mandate and resources to move faster. It requires acceptance that innovation operates at the speed of necessity rather than the speed of bureaucratic deliberation.

The Blue Economy is strategically vital for European economic development and resilience. Climate adaptation is increasingly urgent rather than merely important. Ocean restoration represents environmental and economic necessity. These do not proceed at bureaucratic speed; they proceed at the speed of need. The permitting system must evolve to match. The evidence has been gathered; the analysis is clear; the solutions are identified. What remains is the political decision to act.