Paolo Ciucci

From a primarily public law perspective, and using biological lenses as well, we assess two decades of implementation of the National Action Plan for the Conservation of the Apennine brown bear (PATOM). This was originally intended as an innovative model of coordinated governance for the effective conservation of the Apennine brown bear within a fragmented institutional environment, grounded in agreements among public authorities. Our interdisciplinary endeavour engages in dialogue with scholarship on policy coordination, Environmental Policy Integration, and coherence between biodiversity protection and sectoral policies to develop the new concept of Coordinated Conservation Governance (CCG).
Ecologically, the PATOM rests on a relatively good understanding of demographic vulnerability, genetic isolation, and habitat requirements. Awareness of which management measures could secure durable population recovery permeates it. Yet the translation of this knowledge into effective conservation actions has remained tentative and overall, very limited. Ecological information is scattered and loose in decision-making, and management responses have struggled to secure significant outcomes.
The PATOM, therefore, appears less like a consolidated model of coordinated conservation than a fragile attempt to maintain alignment among actors, knowledge, and decision-making arenas over time. Its underachievement indicates that successful biodiversity governance hinges on the functional integration between ecologically informed decision-making within transforming institutional contexts, matched with clear and effective mechanisms of evaluation and accountability.
Interpreting the PATOM through CCG clarifies both the possibilities and limits of current European approaches to biodiversity protection, indicating that coherence between biodiversity and socio-economic prosperity hinges on institutional conditions that allow ecological knowledge to guide collective action over time.