Abstract Over the course of the twentieth century, nature conservation gradually became both a broadly accepted and highly contentious field of public policy. In particular, national parks (NPs), a major and one of the oldest conservation tools in the European Union, have been contested, and their promoters must justify their existence. We aim to document and analyse how NP managers have sought to make NPs legitimate in the case of France. We first define the notion of legitimacy and present its various sources and types, notably in the case of conservation policies. We then retrace the evolution of the ways legitimacy has been attributed to French NPs. In line with the strong national tradition, legitimacy under the 1960 law on NPs was very much state- and science-based, i.e., essentially substantive. The 2006 reform gave more weight to procedural legitimacy, reflecting the participatory turn of French NPs, which was strongly supported by European guidelines. We finally analyse the tensions between these ways of producing legitimacy and show that the attempts to overcome these tensions have varied from one park to the next. The need to combine sources of legitimacy has generated innovative and contextualized but also fragile ways of creating legitimacy for NPs and implementing European conservation policies.

中文翻译：

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在欧洲生物多样性保护政策中寻求合法性：以法国国家公园为例

摘要 在 20 世纪的进程中，自然保护逐渐成为一个被广泛接受和高度争议的公共政策领域。尤其是，国家公园 (NPs) 作为欧盟主要的和最古老的保护工具之一，一直受到争议，它们的发起人必须证明它们的存在是合理的。我们的目标是记录和分析 NP 经理如何在法国的案例中寻求使 NP 合法化。我们首先定义合法性的概念并介绍其各种来源和类型，特别是在保护政策的情况下。然后，我们追溯了合法性归因于法国 NP 的方式的演变。与强大的民族传统相一致，1960 年关于 NP 的法律的合法性在很大程度上是基于国家和科学的，即本质上是实质性的。2006 年的改革更加重视程序合法性，反映了法国 NP 的参与性转向，这得到了欧洲指导方针的大力支持。我们最终分析了这些产生合法性的方式之间的紧张关系，并表明克服这些紧张局势的尝试因公园而异。结合合法性来源的需要已经产生了创新的、情境化的但也是为 NP 创造合法性和实施欧洲保护政策的脆弱方式。