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The emergence of the environment in the 1960s was a break with both nature as a social construction and the nature/society split which was presumed to underwrite it. Policies with regard to nature are now distanced from those sectoral policies which were narrowly defined and strictly framed, albeit with ambitious aims for territorial management and landscape planning. Now, diffuse and multiform, deterritorialized and globalized developments cut across rural and urban worlds, through complex networks of actors and practices. The increasing significance of the environment has resulted in a reconfiguration of institutional organisation and collective practices concerning conservation and territorial management: a reshaping of cognitive as well as of practical settings and frames in order to meet operational requirements for fluidity and exchanges capable, on the one hand, of ensuring coherence and coordination and, on the other, of long term steering.