National Report on Current Policy, Procedures, Legal Basis and Practice of Marine Spatial Planning in Croatia PAP/RAC Split, October 2007 This project has been financially supported by the European Union Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................ii List of Tables..........................................................................................................................................ii 1. Spatial Planning in Croatia: General Description ............................................................ 1 1.1 Evolution of Spatial Planning in Croatia........................................................................................1 1.2 Planning Agencies ........................................................................................................................ 2 1.3 Legal Framework .......................................................................................................................... 4 2. Spatial Planning in Coastal Zones................................................................................... 11 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 11 2.2 Main Characteristics, Activities and Issues in Coastal Area....................................................... 12 2.3 Planning ...................................................................................................................................... 17 3. Integrated Coastal Zone Management ............................................................................ 19 3.1 Legal and Institutional Framework .............................................................................................. 19 3.2 Instruments ................................................................................................................................. 22 3.3 ICZM Issues ................................................................................................................................ 23 3.4 Conclusion for ICZM ................................................................................................................... 25 4. Marine Spatial Planning.................................................................................................... 27 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 27 4.2 Marine Legislation ....................................................................................................................... 28 4.3 Sea-use in the Country ............................................................................................................... 29 5. Linkages With International Policy.................................................................................. 40 5.1 Linkages to EU ICZM Recommendations................................................................................... 40 5.2 Linkages With Other International Policy.................................................................................... 40 6. Conclusions....................................................................................................................... 42 Bibliography and References.................................................................................................. 43 i List of Figures Figure 1: Spatial Planning System – Institutional Structure and Planning Levels........................................ 3 Figure 2: Spatial Distribution of Existing Protected Areas in Croatia ...........................................................9 Figure 3: Regulatory “Split” in Croatia's Coastal Zone ............................................................................... 20 Figure 4: Fishing Zones’ Borders in the Croatian Adriatic.......................................................................... 32 Figure 5: PSSAs in the Mediterranean as Proposed by WWF................................................................... 36 Figure 6: Zone of Ecological Protection and Fisheries of the Republic of Croatia..................................... 37 Figure 7: Zones Suitable for Fish Farming ................................................................................................. 38 Figure 8: Zones Envisaged for Shell-fish Farming ..................................................................................... 38 Figure 9: Demersal Fish Zones .................................................................................................................. 39 List of Tables Table 1: Protected Areas Types in Croatia .................................................................................................. 8 Table 2: Number and Surface of Protected Areas in the Republic of Croatia (state as of 6 June 2006).... 8 Table 3: Sea Water Quality by County during Bathing Season 2006 ........................................................ 17 Table 4: ICZM SWOT Analysis................................................................................................................... 23 Table 5: Marine Protected Areas in Croatia ............................................................................................... 35 ii National Report – Croatia 1. Spatial Planning in Croatia: General Description 1.1 Evolution of Spatial Planning in Croatia Regulatory plans produced in the 1930s marked the beginning of a long practice of physical planning in Croatia. They also marked the beginning of two planning practices: as opposed to economic planning, which started as a firm centralised activity and gradually relaxed and got decentralised, physical planning gradually grew into a hierarchical multi-level system; physical plans have always been made at state, regional, municipal and sub-municipal levels. Unlike social plans, physical plans were compulsory from the very beginning and there has always been a law about them. Once adopted, physical plans have always had a legal force and their preparation has always been reserved for licensed planning companies and institutes who had to follow a prescribed procedure. A public hearing as a form of ex-post citizens' participation has been a part of the preparation of municipal and regional plans for decades. On the other hand, detailed plans that usually cover quite a small part of a municipality have to be in accordance with the municipal plan, which in turn has to be consistent with higher level plans. No plan can come into force without approval from all higher levels. This hierarchical and centralised system was established already in the 1950s but due to frequent changes of territorial administrative division and weak institutions, a hierarchical monitoring and evaluation mechanism was never developed. The system perpetuated itself successfully. By the end of the 1980s, it had been well established with a strong professional group of physical planners who studied at one of the five Yugoslav Faculties of Architecture. Unapproved construction on the outskirts of big cities and in the tourist areas revealed the inability of the authorities to enforce planning recommendations and land-use regulations. Due to a lack of monitoring, the extent of these violations has rarely been recorded. Hardly any data on the implementation of physical plans has ever been gathered either. Furthermore, physical plans hardly ever referred to existing social plans and vice versa. It was never known whether enough space was reserved for the expected growth of the municipal and/or the wider regional economy, if there was enough space for residential housing reserved for an increase of the labour force, and so on. A comprehensive warranted spatial development policy that would cover physical and structural planning never existed under socialism. Ever increasing physical planning and ever decreasing structural economic planning existed almost independently. With regard to the importance of the coastal region for the whole country, in the 1970s, the United Nations were asked for assistance in further planning of coastal development. As a result, the entire coastal region was covered by a series of physical plans prepared over a period of 10 years, which contained a number of elements that correspond to what we call today “sustainable development”. These plans were known as Adriatic I, Adriatic II and Adriatic III (see Chapter 2.1). 1 Maritime Spatial Planning: Current Policy, Procedures, Legal Bases and Practice In the 1980s, the situation became a little more complicated. In 1982, a regulation on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was passed in Croatia, and a new document – the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) – became a compulsory part of project documentation for particular investments. This was a pretty straightforward application of US legislation on EIA and soon gained momentum. By the end of the 1980s, a new profession emerged - physical planning firms extended their expertise (some even specialised) and started producing EISs, with some 200 EISs produced by the end of the 1980s. This activity was never consistently incorporated into the physical planning system (Kordej-De Villa et al., 2005). At the beginning of the nineties, here were expectations that Croatia, as an independent state, would start off its spatial development on new grounds and with new objectives, as compared with the former