The Directive on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora (Habitats Directive) aims to protect biodiversity in the European Union. It does so within a complex ecology of legal regimes for environmental protection at the international, EU, national, and regional levels. As the EU has continued to expand its competence, and the role of EU law for environmental protection continues to develop within the member states, it is important to examine the effect that EU law is having on biodiversity horizontally between states for the protection of transboundary populations, and the effect it has vertically as it interacts with international and national law.

This collection is a licentiate thesis consisting of four articles addressing the challenge of protecting species populations across legal jurisdictions. Its central aim is to examine how interactions and shifting centers of authority between different legal species protection regimes impact species protection. These legal systems may be contiguous, such as in the case of neighboring countries, or overlapping, such as in the case of EU and national law. Four sub-questions develop the analysis, each the central investigation of an article. The first article asks how EU law, and international law, affects the protection of transboundary populations of protected species in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The second narrows in on a single concrete example in a member state, analyzing how EU law has affected the evolution of species protection in Sweden. The third lifts the analysis out of the Nordic context to examine more closely how the cooperation and tension between international and EU species protection law help or hinder the policy objectives of both. The fourth widens the scope further still, using a comparison with species protection in the United States to query how the division of responsibility for species protection between the federal or union level and the state or member state level affects protection.

Human laws manage the natural world, as best they can. But the resultant tangle of overlapping jurisdictions of laws and rules and management strategies becomes its own ecology to be explored, mapped and ordered. The title, “Governing Ecologies”, refers to this investigation of the governing of ecology and the ecology of governing.

This dissertation examines how eco-knowledge intersects with the changes to EU legal cultures and practices known as eurolegalism. This conjunction has created a mechanism for the extension of EU law in the Member States even in the face of a weakened EU.

Through a portfolio of six articles, controversies over the protection of wolves in Sweden are used to illustrate and explicate the changing roles and responsibilities of various actors in protecting species, and the centralization of competence for environmental protection in Europe at the EU level. In doing so, some substantive requirements of the Habitats Directive are also analyzed. The first article maps the movement of competence to determine conservation policy towards the EU level and away from international and Member State actors. The second article examines what the EU requires of its Member States by analyzing the Habitats Directive’s key concept, favourable conservation status. It also makes normative arguments for how contested aspects of this concept should be interpreted to best achieve the Directive’s conservation goals. The third article deepens this analysis by applying these arguments to the Swedish wolf population. The fourth article is a case commentary illustrating the enforcement of the Habitats Directive through public interest litigation to stop the hunting of Swedish wolves. The fifth argues that the greater availability of public interest standing in the US than in the EU has led to the greater implementation of federal law. The sixth argues that greater availability of public interest litigation in Sweden than previously is also leading to the greater enforcement of “federal” EU law. Each of these articles demonstrates or explains factors that lead to the hollowing out of state power in favor of the EU and interest groups.