Conservation of Biodiversity as a European Directive: The Challenge for France

Abstract

S ince Rio 92, the struggle against the erosion of biodiversity has been a part of many environmental policies, even though the ways to pursue this goal are not agreed on by all parties. There are many controversies in both northern and southern countries regarding nature areas to be protected and the participation of 'traditional' or local populations in natural resource management. The purpose of the Habitats directive, based explicitly on scientific knowledge, is to preserve biological diversity on a European scale through the conservation of natural habitats and wild fauna and flora. It also advocates that the choice of sites for conservation should take into consideration economic, political and local social constraints. It differs from the standard environmental protection policy approaches in the principles that it espouses -maintaining biodiversity and sustainable development -which played a significant role in revitalizing the decision-making process. These new referentials affect the way in which environmental issues are viewed and add complexity to the way of dealing with them. The transfer of the directive to France (see Alphandery and Fortier 2001) and its local applications initially favoured the scientific dimension at the expense of social issues, thereby provoking resistance, demands, and innovations. The challenge to the site identification process from spokesmen for the rural milieu leads us first of all to ask questions regarding the scientific basis of this nature policy. As this basis is uncertain, incomplete and controversial, these challenges continue. We then consider the text of the directive as it was published in the official journal to highlight the foundations, the theoretically innovative aspects, but also its limitations and contradictions. Our hypothesis is that biodiversity, as conceived in the directive and the proposed framework for action, contains many contradictions which account for the outbursts in political and scientific circles, which its application caused in France. From Rio 92 to Brussels 92: the foundations of the directive A new referentialDuring its writing, the Habitats directive was marked by the scientific, economic and political context of the last twenty years, which can be summarized in the following manner: criticism of the paradigm of development and spreading of the

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