Poliarchie / Polyarchies Special Issue 2025

Starting from the results of a study on the food and wine offer of the Karst plateau that extends over the Italian-Slovenian border area and, more specifically, on the sustainability and application criteria of slow tourism by restaurant operators, the contribution explores the propensity of this reality to move towards models of sustainability, necessary for a development in line with the new social (meanings attributed to food), economic (promotion of soft tourism) and environmental (protection of biodiversity) demands and needs. The sustainability model illustrated operates on three dimensions: short supply chain and local biodiversity; slow tourism applied to sustainable food and wine; networked governance and integrated territorial planning. With reference to the reality studied, the model calls for promoting a more collaborative territorial governance, investing in digital communication and raising the awareness of the local community towards a shared tourism vision oriented towards sustainability.

Dominant agricultural and environmental legal frameworks in Italy and the European Union continue to marginalise peasant seed systems, despite growing evidence of their superior performance under conditions of water scarcities and heat stress. Focusing on the regions of Puglia and Sicilia, this article explores how alternative legal strategies, including cultural provenance protocols and regional law amendments, can facilitate the circulation of unregistered, coevolved, and drought-resistant seed varieties. Drawing on legal pluralism and critical legal studies, it frames seeds as more-than-human legal subjects and examines how bottom-up models such as Houses of Seeds and Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) challenge hegemonic barriers to propagation. Through a case study of a contemporary performative artwork structured as a seed exchange protocol, the article analyses collaborations with museums and farmer cooperatives that temporarily host legal grey zones and enact prefigurative legalities. It opens up possibilities to reimagine law as a tool for care, climate adaptation, and collective governance over genetic resources for the future generations and argues for a Rights of Nature-inspired framework applied to seeds, grounded in agroecology, situated knowledge, and anticipatory legal fictions.

After operating a distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘cultivated’ biodiversity, the article defines guardianship and its primary scientific and practical applications, to provide an outline of the regulatory framework governing these activities, taking into account different forms of seed banking. The analysis of this phenomenon highlights its significant cultural value, strong connection to research activities, the risks associated with the protection of intellectual property rights, and the threats of overly-rigid regulations. Furthermore, the essay points out the perils posed by bureaucratization and increased costs. The issue of cultivated biodiversity’s guardianship reveals its high political importance in terms of safeguarding the environmental and social values at stake, and requires the adoption of integrated and differentiated solutions that counteract the drift toward an ‘indifferent food from nowhere’.

The article analyses the genesis and development of the principle do no significant harm within the European Union legal order, from the Green Deal to taxonomy regulations, to the Recovery and Resilience Facility, before focusing on its application to the Italian PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan), as well as its legal classification, its relationship with other European environmental principles and with the Italian constitutional reform of February 2022.

This article examines the emergence of the ecosystem approach as a new legal paradigm within European Union law, focusing on its normative and jurisprudential evolution. Tracing the concept’s international origins and its incorporation into the EU legal framework, the analysis highlights how this approach is increasingly being consolidated not only as a guiding principle but also as an operational legal standard, imposing a systemic perspective centered on ecological processes. Particular attention is given to the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which in recent years has developed an ecologically oriented interpretation of biodiversity law, positioning itself as a guardian of ecosystemic coherence. The case of wolf management is explored as a litmus test of the tensions between ecological imperatives and anthropocentric interests – tensions that hinder the full realization of the ecosystem approach while underscoring the urgent need for a new legal grammar of coexistence, based on ecological relationships and shared responsibilities.