Review of the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF)

The review included interviews with project leads and an online survey of grant recipients. Key themes that emerged from these interviews included: 

• Importance of SMEEF funding: Many interviewees emphasised that without SMEEF funding, their project would not have gone ahead, underscoring the crucial role SMEEF played. Several projects supported by SMEEF focused on creating and testing new equipment, which facilitated the gathering of novel data sets. 

• A positive experience: The SMEEF team was regarded as having a highly practical approach to delivering projects. Effective communication with the SMEEF team was noted as a key benefit. 

• Timescales and funding: Most interviewees noted that SMEEF’s initial one-year funding cycle, driven by public funding limits, made it challenging to achieve long-term environmental improvements (this limitation didn’t apply to private donations.) However, shorter funding cycles with smaller grants were seen as more beneficial for smaller organisations than larger ones. 

• Limited capacity: All of the smaller organisations interviewed expressed concerns about their limited internal resources to develop projects, write funding applications, and provide comprehensive project reports. 

• Reporting requirements: In general, the project leads interviewed felt that the current level of project reporting was manageable and appropriate given the amount of funding received. However, some interviewees expressed uncertainty about how the submitted reports and the information within them were used. 

Recommendations 

The suggestions put forward in the report aim to ensure that SMEEF can continue to support high-impact, long-term environmental projects for years to come. Recommendations include: 

• Aligning SMEEF objectives with evolving national marine policies, such as the National Marine Plan 2 and the Marine Restoration Plan, to both elevate SMEEF’s role in the delivery of restoration activity and ensure SMEEF funded projects are supporting Scotland’s wider marine restoration targets. 

• Adjusting reporting requirements to ensure they are proportionate to the scale of funding and the capacity of smaller organisations. 

• Conducting an in-depth review of SMEEF’s impact every 3-5 years, to determine SMEEF’s longer-term impact. 

Read the report here.