Biodiversity planners increasingly recognise the need for delivering action on a ’wider countryside’, rather than on a purely site-centred, basis. Ecological processes often take place at the ’landscape scale’ and are not sufficiently accommodated within reserves, and a failure to reflect this in biodiversity planning has been one of the contributors to species and habitat decline. However, there are generally few powers to enforce compliance with spatial rural land-use strategies, and biodiversity plans at the landscape scale must rely heavily on incentives, advice and goodwill. Not surprisingly, this results in a substantial gap between policy and implementation. One way of analysing the causes of and potential solutions to, implementation failure is to examine the barriers to plan uptake. This paper addresses barriers to biodiversity action in three case-study areas in terms of ’force fields’, depicting the nature and strength of negative and positive influences on land managers and conservation staff. It is concluded that a clearer understanding of the nature of ’barriers’ can lead to improved targeting on potential ’bridges’ to a better future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]