The development of effective biodiversity conservation management plans and policies requires a sound understanding of the driving forces involved in shaping and altering biodiversity and structure and function of ecosystems. However, driving forces, especially anthropogenic ones, are defined and operate at multiple administrative levels, which do not always match ecological scales. Scale sensitivity varies considerably among drivers, which can be classified into five broad categories depending on the response of ‘evenness’ and ‘intensity change’ when moving across administrative levels. Indirect drivers tend to show low scale sensitivity, whereas direct drivers show high scale sensitivity, as they operate in a non-linear way across the administrative scale. Thus policies addressing direct drivers of change, in particular, need to take scale into consideration during their formulation. Moreover, such policies must have a strong spatial focus, which can be achieved either by encouraging local-regional policy making or by introducing high flexibility in (inter)national policies to accommodate increased differentiation at lower administrative levels.

Natura 2000 sites have been selected for protection based on their conservation importance, and may be particularly vulnerable to environmental pressures. Human-induced drivers (factors that directly or indirectly cause ecosystem changes) can impact with differing intensities at various spatial scales. When driver intensity varies markedly across spatial scales it is described as non-linear. An analysis of drivers across administrative levels, from national to local, identified clear non-linearities in drivers. The characteristics of drivers at higher administrative levels (e.g. country) are informative for describing broad land use contexts, but are not reliable predictors of the intensity of drivers at the scale of individual Natura 2000 sites. Therefore it is imperative for policies targeting nature conservation to take into account drivers at multiple scales with mitigation responses targeted at the appropriate administrative level.

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One of the core challenges of biodiversity conservation is to better understand the interconnectedness and interactions of scales in ecological and governance processes. These interrelationships constitute not only a complex analytical challenge but they also open up a channel for deliberative discussions and knowledge exchange between and among various societal actors which may themselves be operating at various scales, such as policy makers, land use planners, members of NGOs, and researchers. In this paper, we discuss and integrate the perspectives of various disciplines academics and stakeholders who participated in a workshop on scales of European biodiversity governance organised in Brussels in the autumn of 2010. The 23 participants represented various governmental agencies and NGOs from the European, national, and sub-national levels. The data from the focus group discussions of the workshop were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The core scale-related challenges of biodiversity policy identified by the participants were cross-level and cross-sector limitations as well as ecological, social and social-ecological complexities that potentially lead to a variety of scale-related mismatches. As ways to address these cha- llenges the participants highlighted innovations, and an aim to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to support the processes aiming to solve current scale challenges.

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