4. Designating Natura 2000 Under the Habitats Directive

To assess the question of whether the Habitats Directive’s provisions on designating Natura 2000 are optimally drafted to allow Member States compliance with their designation obligations, this chapter will provide a detailed analysis of each step necessary to designate an eligible national conservation site as SAC and thus part of Natura 2000. The Habitats Directive’s provisions on designating Natura 2000 will be broken down into individual steps that the Member States must follow. Testing schemes will be developed to illustrate the complexity of the selection and designation procedure. This chapter will further assess whether additional reasons might have added to the incomplete designation of Natura 2000. For this purpose, the various Member States’ implementation methods of the European law into their national legal systems will be examined. It will be assessed whether the different implementation styles have caused a difference in the setup levels and quality of Natura 2000 to examine whether the drafting of the Habitats Directive might have added to the compliance struggles of Member States to designate Natura 2000.