In Greece, the legal framework for health and safety, in the offshore oil industry, followed a two stages evolution path. In the first stage, the legal framework was simple and treated the offshore oil installations as ships. The second stage is featured by an abrupt shift from the government to the governance paradigm, which originated from the obligation of the country to embed the EU Directive EE30/2013 in the Greek legal framework.
The European Commission, decided to take advantage of the relevant knowledge and experience from the North Sea-mainly from United Kingdom and Norway-in order to build a EU legal framework appropriate for and applicable to the member states.
However, it took almost fifty years for the UK and Norway, to realize the shift from the government (top-down) to the governance (mutual trust) model, through the influence of major accidents and political and administrative reforms. This evolution path matured the stakeholders and created a culture of cooperation and mutual trust; necessary conditions for the new model to succeed.
There are strong doubts about the successful implementation of the new EU legal framework in the rest of the EU countries. The abovementioned necessary conditions have yet to be created. Also, a series of other factors (technical, cultural, social, economic, administrative, political and geopolitical) complicate the implementation of the EU directive EE30/2013 in Southern Europe countries, among them Greece.
In Greece, except from the new law, a series of regulations, ministerial decisions, committees, regulatory groups and forums, etc have to be issued/constituted. However, the major problem to be addressed is adoption of the new more consensual and cooperative culture. This is not possible to come only from the governments of the countries that face the problems, in a top-down way. All of the stakeholders must be involved, the EU, the industry, the academia, the unions, NGOs etc., utilizing governance methods, in several possible forms of partnership and coordination. The first step should be recognition and assessment of the problem (framing and screening for each country) and communicating it to the stakeholders. This presentation works on that direction.