2. Preparing for the public debate: preliminary discussions, information and data useful to the port, project owner

As noted in Section 1, the public debate procedure is reserved for the most ambitious port projects. In view of the experience acquired by ports, as owners of this type of project, we can wonder about the nature of the questions that interest the owner before preparing his dossier for public debate.

In practice, moreover, the first question they are asked is that of opportunity, which requires the project justification section to be developed, followed by the question of possible variants.

To simplify matters, we propose to :

• consider the different types of development envisaged (§ 2.1