Trends of Accountability Management for Environmental Sustainability: Evidence from the Italian Maritime Protected Areas (MPAs)

Unfortunately, the topicality of natural resource issues stems from the serious problems that affect them and make environmental sustainability crucial. This situation is so complex that it involves many categories of actors. Certainly, a major role is played by public administration, given its institutional function as manager of the territory and its environment. Another key player is the community, which is a fundamental stakeholder in the field of environmental sustainability, starting from its role as the recipient of information on the environment aimed at making citizens aware and sensitizing them towards adopting environmental protection behavior. From the above stems the research interest in the issue of accountability for environmental sustainability in a particular category of public organizations represented by Maritime Protected Areas (MPAs), considering the sea protection activities they are called upon to perform. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to investigate the accountability profile for environmental sustainability of MPAs. To this end, two methodologies are applied. Firstly, semi-structured interviews are used to identify both the main areas of the MPAs’ website dedicated to accountability on institutional activities (and, therefore, on environmental sustainability) and the main planning and reporting documents on these activities. Secondly, the websites of all Italian MPAs are analyzed to verify the website sections and documents resulting from the interviews. The analysis results allow us to conclude that the MPAs denote only an online predisposition towards accountability related to environmental sustainability and a limited presence of documents supporting sustainability accountability. This situation highlights low attention towards accountability strategy in the MPAs. In addition, the conclusions highlight some managerial implications and the work limit.