The REDRESS governance and policy team took advantage of the annual project meeting to hold a 2-day workshop in Barcelona prior to the main meeting, hosted by ICM-CSIC. Project participants travelled in from Greece (HCMR), the Netherlands (WU), Portugal (UAviero, UAzores) and Italy (UNIVPM). The scope of the workshop was the distillation of 50 in-depth interviews with stakeholders completed over the last year, and background documents relating to 5 deep sea restoration cases (Dohrn Canyon, Guilvinec Canyon, Catalan margin, Shetland, Condor Seamount). This analysis focused primarily on the discourses and narratives around restoration and the actors (stakeholders) which identifies, for example the main driver for restoration (e.g. helping nature to recover), supporting discourses (e.g. legal obligation to restore) and opposing discourses (e.g. use and conservation conflicts over sea space and objecting to closures). Brainstorming and flip chart schematics looked at how governance arrangements are formulated now and how these might change with NRR and in the future. This will form the basis of our deliverable in the next months and also a deeper comparison between case studies over the next year. WP5 results were also presented at the main meeting. Prizes were awarded to the star analysts Johanna Buerkert (WU) and Laura Trovão (UAveiro).
