The complexity and the gradual accumulation of environmental problems exacerbate governance challenges at various scales. There has been much helpful theorising about these challenges, but addressing them empirically and in meaningful policy advice requires even better operationalising. Analytically, governance mechanisms tend to be geared either toward reaching set goals with control, enforcement and monitoring or toward managing adjustable goals with adaptiveness and learning. As the normative criteria of control and adaptiveness imply differing considerations of scales and cross-scale interactions in governance, we take these theoretical criteria as a starting point in our analysis of: 1) command and control, 2) planning and management, 3) market-oriented mechanisms and economic instruments and 4) collaborative and participatory governance mechanisms, in biodiversity conservation. This chapter seeks to narrow the gaps in the conceptual analyses of scales, the urgent expectations on biodiversity conservation and the normative evaluation of control and adaptiveness in governance. We combine theory-driven conceptual analysis of scales and governance relevant for biodiversity conservation with secondary analysis of illustrative European biodiversity governance examples. We demonstrate how, despite having differing normative emphases, both control and adaptiveness are needed to improve the scale-effectiveness and scale-sensitivity of biodiversity governance.