Since its inception in 2010, the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem Strategic Action Programme Implementation Project, funded by the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has made significant contributions to the BCC’s structural and operational efficiency. 

The project, formally titled “Implementation of the BCLME Strategic Action Programme for restoring depleted fisheries and reducing coastal resource degradation,” focused much of its efforts on negotiating the Benguela Current Convention. For instance, it initiated and funded the development of the BCC’s Strategic Plan, Business Plan, and Resource Mobilisation Strategy.

The Strategic Action Programme outlines specific country commitments that will be implemented as part of the overall BCLME Programme. It assists the three countries in revising and harmonizing their national policies, legislation, and operational practices in order to establish a transboundary regional approach to managing the Large Marine Ecosystem (LME).  An LME approach to ocean governance is based on the need for multi-country collaboration to achieve sustainable, ecosystem-based management of economically important goods and services. The LME approach has been used in the BCLME region since the mid-1990s, with the support of various development partners and donors. To that end, the BCC’s foundational papers, including the Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA), were revised.

The TDA provides the technical input for the BCC Strategic Action Programme. It ranks the relative importance of transboundary issues and proposes policy-based preventative and remedial measures to help achieve BCLME sustainability. The SAP is supplemented by an Implementation Plan, an operational document that details the activities required to   implement the policy actions. The BCLME community created the first TDA and SAP in 1999, and it repeated the process in 2013 to create updated and improved documents with an accompanying Implementation Plan.

The current SAP (2015–2019) reflects the objectives, principles, and functions outlined for the BCC in the recently signed Benguela Current Convention, the policy framework that now governs the BCLME community. It addresses the BCLME’s challenges and recommends policy actions aimed at resolving transboundary environmental issues, addressing key threats and their root causes, and enhancing opportunities for sustainable development within the BCLME.

The commission’s work is guided by this five-year SAP, which covers eight themes: living marine resources, non-living marine resources, productivity and environmental variability, pollution, ecosystem health and biodiversity, human dimensions, enhancing economic development potential, and governance.