The Maritime Sector and Resilience-building in a Small State: The Qatar

In recent years, Qatar has developed its maritime energy and non-energy sectors extensively, establishing new state-of-the-art fleets, port facilities and infrastructure; maritime sustainability programs; and next generation maritime technologies. It is the central hypothesis of this project that the maritime sector will become an increasingly vital societal actor in Qatar and central to the country’s success in building resilience and achieving prosperity for generations to come. Our project will test this hypothesis around two scientific objectives. Objective 1 is to identify how Qatar can develop the resilience of its maritime sector in line with QRDI 2030’s vision and priority themes. From its own position of resilience, the nation’s maritime sector will then be equipped to contribute, in turn, to societal resilience and the prosperity of future generations of Qataris. Objective 2 is to assess the ways that Qatari policymakers can respond to future economic, political, security and societal challenges and opportunities in the maritime sector. This project, intended to run for three-years, will use a mixed methods approach to carry out these two objectives. We have broken it into three Work Packages (WPs): WP1 will assess Qatar’s rapidly expanding port economy. WP2 will document the vitally important interrelationship between the maritime and energy sectors in terms of cross-sectoral resilience-building. WP 3 will identify best practices in the maritime sectors of three small maritime powers – Malta, Djibouti, and Belize – that Qatar can draw upon as it develops its own maritime sector. The project will generate three main outcomes. The first will be publications that fill a gap in the general literature by identifying how the maritime identity and interests of small states can inform their policymaking. A second outcome will pertain specifically to Qatar, as we rectify the absence of literature that addresses its maritime sector in terms of the national priority themes of QRDI 2030. Indeed, our project has the potential to have considerable impact within three of those themes: society, energy, and resource sustainability (see Section 1.3). A final key outcome will be knowledge-transfer and capacity building in Qatar’s maritime sector, as we offer actionable proposals and professional education seminars to end-users that will impact policy-thinking on how to build a resilient maritime sector that contributes to wider societal resilience and prosperity. Important Qatari end-users for these capacity-building efforts who have joined our project and have provided representatives as project liaisons are: The Ministry of Finance; The Ministry of Transportation; Qatari Emiri Navy of the Qatar Armed Forces; Qatar Investment Authority (QIA); QatarGas; Mwani Qatar (the Port Authority); Nakilat (Qatar’s Gas Transport Company); and the Qatar Free Zones Authority. All play a central role in developing Qatar’s maritime sector and are well positioned to implement the findings and recommendations of the project for short-and long-term impacts.

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar