Since the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, preserving biodiversity has become a sine qua non of environmental management and part of official policy. The EC Habitats Directive (HD) was adopted in the same year, with the aim of creating a European network of sites rich in biodiversity, under the name Natura 2000. Following a period of controversy that in 1996 led to its application in France being frozen, the Ministry for the Environment opted for a process of consultation and discussion to determine how each site was to be managed. The resulting instrument, called the ‘document of objectives’ (Docob), appears to be an example of procedural policy-making that provides a framework within which agreement between the various actors involved at local level may be achieved. Its aim is to encourage local actors to take upon themselves the task of preserving biodiversity. This article follows closely the interactions among the various participants, in those spaces for debate, or ‘local settings’ or ‘stages’. The thinking thus developed foregrounds the study of a policy ‘in progress’; it tries to characterize the status of local settings and to explain how they can be understood from a sociological point of view. It shows that provisionality and proliferation of procedures are necessary conditions for implementing this directive, and indicates a number of specific features of environmental politics. Lastly, it asks questions about establishing a new way of managing the natural environment.