The purpose of this paper is to address important issues regarding policy formulation in the maritime safety area. The main thesis of the paper is that there is some way to achieve a truly proactive maritime safety regime, and there even seems to be recent progress toward this end. A qualitative assessment on the nature of maritime safety policies and on the way that these are put forward is attempted, along with some opinions on the possible pitfalls and on what needs to be done so that this process can be further improved.