Presentation short abstract

The paper examines Pantelleria, a Mediterranean inland island turned national park without a marine protected area, to analyse how green-frontier conservation produces conflict and resistance across land–sea boundaries in Europe’s marginal areas.

Presentation long abstract

This paper uses the failed marine protected area (MPA) of Pantelleria, a small Italian island in the Sicilian Channel, to explore conservation justice at Europe’s green frontiers. Between 2007–2016, Pantelleria was transformed into a National Park covering most of the land, promoted as a climate-smart conservation fix and engine of sustainable tourism, while the long-discussed MPA remained on paper. In 2024 a local referendum initiative on the Park’s possible extension to the sea was declared inadmissible, and the pro-referendum committee re-founded itself as a Civic Council for the Park.

Drawing on an extended political ecology of conservation, environmental and climate justice, and data justice, the paper reads Pantelleria as an inland island where agriculture is central to identity, and the sea is emotionally present but socially marginal. It reconstructs the institutional history of the Park–MPA nexus and analyses qualitative interviews, documents and civic materials to trace conflicts along three axes: vertical (state/region), horizontal (institutions/communities), and local (land/sea users).

The paper argues that the failure of the MPA results from a constellation of factors: the negative institutional legacy of the National Park, weak and tokenistic participation, limited recognition of local ecological knowledge, internal community fractures, opaque data practices, and the lack of a shared narrative that frames conservation as a legitimate collective response to the climate crisis. In doing so, it uses Pantelleria to show how marine conservation at Europe’s margins can reproduce unequal territorialisation, while also pointing to the need for more relational, justice-oriented and convivial approaches to land–sea governance.