Integrated Management of Coastal Zones in Venezuela

In 1999, Venezuela began a Pilot Project for Coastal Marine Areas, establishing a Technical Unit in the now-defunct Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources. During the last 21 years, the foundations were laid for the Integrated Coastal Zones Management, approving a Coastal Zones Law in 2001 and developing a comprehensive Planning and Management Plan for Coastal Zones, concluded in 2014, which has not yet been approved. Even though, in practice, there is still no adequate institutional structure to attend to the integrated management of maritime and island spaces from a multidisciplinary perspective, these two instruments lay the foundations for the Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the development of Marine Spatial Planning. This paper seeks to analyze the reality of the management of coastal and marine zones in Venezuela during the last two decades (period 1999-2020), highlighting the initiatives developed to organize the necessary institutionality to execute the planning, zoning and integrated management processes that will promote the sustainability of coastal and marine spaces. The methodology used focuses on the analysis of the temporal evolution of the processes and instruments developed for the public management of the coastal and marine areas of the country.