The principle of biodiversity impacts mitigation has existed for more than 30 years in France with the nature protection law of 1976. It was just recently that strict application of the biodiversity offsets recommendation emerges with the mitigation hierarchy guideline in 2012. The aim of the mitigation hierarchy was to achieve the No Net Loss of biodiversity establishing equivalence principle between the impacts caused to biodiversity by constructions with the recovery of ecosystems after offsetting measures have been made. It is admitted that it exists two ways to implement biodiversity offsets: mitigation banking and responsibility permittee system, but reality seems more complex. Indeed based on this, any kind of organizational configuration are occurring and allowing today in France.

The workability of biodiversity offsets mobilized a large range of stakeholders with new local agreements or contracts suggesting different social and financial implications. Our aims were to obtain a widely vision and highlight the consequences of these new rearrangements on biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. We have done sociological interviews from actors in charge of biodiversity offsets while analyzing the variety of configurations as the type of (1) partnerships (public, semi-public and private), (2) reciprocity exchanges (environmental, economic, social), (3) land managements (acquisition, rent, territorial planning) and also (4) stakeholders positions changes during the agreement (farmer, offsets measures operator, land owner, measures manager). In this talk, we will focused on few key case studies to show how these new configurations can impact directly on biodiversity management and finally on conservation outcomes.