Building EU Maritime Safety Regulatory Capacity

Abstract

The chapter applies the book’s theoretical lens to maritime safety authorities. The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) inspects the regulatory practices of national regulators and provides training for national officials. This has the potential to build regulatory capacity to manage cross-border risks by ensuring that no national authority creates regulatory loopholes through lax inspection practices. While EMSA’s inspections help UK and German authorities to handle one key regulatory challenge they face (lax port state control inspections by other regulators), they are highly sceptical about EMSA’s, and the EU’s, ability to contribute to the second core challenge they perceive: the maintenance of an international maritime safety regime. As a result, capacity building through mutual exchange is restrained due to a lack of proactive support of high capacity national regulators. Capacity building instead rests on EMSA inspections and infringement proceedings.