MarSP project intends to reinforce the Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) processes in the three EU Macaronesian Archipelagos - Azores, Madeira and Canary Islands. MarSP aims to assists the competent authorities of Portugal (Azores and Madeira) and Spain (Canary Islands) on promoting the development of operative mechanisms of Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) until 2021.

Aligned with the European MSP Directive 2014/89/EU and EASME call for MSP Cross-Border cooperation for outermost regions, MarSP will focus in the cooperation of the three regions of Macaronesia (Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands) to ensure a coherent and coordinated MSP process, taking into account the transnational issues.

These three regions of the Macaronesia have been developing their own planning processes according to the Directive 2014/89/EU, national legislation and governance frameworks, which are remarkably different. Currently, each archipelago is in distinct stages of development of MSP implementation. For this reason, a complete homogenization of the approaches for the three regions is not possible and neither desirable. On the other hand, this discrepancy may represent a strong point in this project, since facing distinct MSP processes, designed to deal with similar problems, due to the same geographic context, but at distinct stages of development, will certainly bring a testing dimension to the project that is not negligible.