During the last four decades, nature conservation in protected areas (PAs) has been characterized by major changes. Early PAs have often been perceived as human-exclusion areas, whereas modern PAs have been designated more as integrated conservation and development projects. This evolution has involved major changes in objectives, management practices, governance systems, and relationship of PA’s to their surrounding environments. Nowadays, PA managers take into account processes that go beyond PA boundaries, investigate economic and social issues of development, and pay a special attention to local involvement. Here, we focus on French Nature Reserves (NRs), one of the main regulatory tools of the French nature protection policy. We characterize the interactions between NRs and the socioecosystems in which they interact. This study focus on two scales: the national scale and all of the 277 nature reserves, and the local scale with 10 case studies. At the national scale, we show how the emergence of sustainable development discourses in the nature reserve network have led us to analyze institutional, organizational, cultural and political issues. We describe the distribution of NR practices along a gradient going from a traditional model to an integrative model. We explain the observed practices as a combination of three types of variables : (i) general geographical characteristics of the NRs; (ii) value systems and perceptions of managers and (iii) characteristics of surrounding environments. On the basis of 10 case studies, we characterize the socioecosystems constituted by NRs and their surroundings territories. We analyze the articulation identified at the national scale between conservation practices, characteristics of NRs, territories and managers, both inside the reserves and beyond their spatial and functional boundaries. On the basis of frameworks for analyzing sustainability of complex socioecosystems, ecological solidarity, political ecology and institutional approaches, we identify the key variables in the implementation of collective action and adaptive management of both NRs and socioecosystems. Our analysis illustrates the limits of the implemented institutional arrangements. We conclude on the idea of NR trajectories, and on the practical implications of this work for the French NR system.
