Transboundary governance of marine protected areas : a comparison of the North Adriatic and Wadden Sea case studies

International agreements like the Convention on Biodiversity are soliciting the development of transboundary networks of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in order to improve the protection of natural resources and the individual ecological relevance of MPAs. Together with ecosystem based criteria, environmental governance plays a key role in the management of marine and coastal areas in particularly at transboundary scale. Therefore this research focuses on two study cases relevant for transboundary governance for MPAs. The first case study is the North Adriatic, regarding the analysis of the network of MPAs in the North Adriatic Sea at a transboundary level among Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. The second case study regards the analysis of the governance of the Wadden sea trilateral cooperation for the management of the area that started in 1978. One of the objectives of this work was the identification and analysis of the figure of the policy entrepreneur and the strategies used to bring about a policy change in the environmental conservation strategies in the two case studies. Policy entrepreneurs are defined as those individuals or organisations that thanks to their perseverance, ingenuity, and willingness to spend time and resources for an idea, can help bringing about a policy change. Moreover, in the North Adriatic case the research applied also social network analysis methods to identify the main actors involved (e.g. managers of MPAs, NGOs, governmental agencies and other actors relevant for MPAs), their roles and relations within the system of governance of MPAs in the North Adriatic. Focus interviews were also used to investigates possible ways to improve the efficiency of MPAs and the existing constraints that can slow the process. From the analysis of the role of policy entrepreneurs, in both case studies these were found among organizations out of the government. In both cases, individual stakeholders were supported by a staff of an organization or a company and they applied a number of strategies such as the so called “window of opportunity” and “venue shopping”. In the North Adriatic case the analysis of the governance of MPAs let emerge the need to enhance collaboration among MPAs in order to exchange expertise, enhance the protection of the coastal and marine resources and gain more political influence in order to cope with the lack of interest of national governments towards the issue.