Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) operates mainly through projects. Envisioned as an efficient mean to inject funds according established targets in specific sectors of the economy, projects have generated a vast managerial literature aiming at optimizing the delivery of rationally planned and controlled outputs. Projects are also widely used to mainstream biodiversity in the ODA sector. However, our genealogy of biodiversity as a global environmental issue shows how this kind of wicked and ambiguous problem challenges the mechanistic rationality at the basis of all ODA project models. Building on both global and local levels, biodiversity issues cannot be properly constructed and managed through ex ante planning processes or ex post evaluations, but are arising from multi-actors interactions throughout the project life.By shifting the traditional focus of analysis of project management we assume a posture of "embedded research" allows us to experiment and describe the strategic activity of conceiving environmental action frames. We are equipping this posture building on Strategic Environmental Management Analysis (SEMA), adjusted with foucaldian analytical frameworks in management science on collective action design.Pairing the concepts of “regime” and “device”, we propose to use them as a central analytic tool to study this strategic activity that articulates a general intention – a biodiversity regime – conceived through a project understood as a device (i.e.: an heterogeneous set of actors, institutions, tools and knowledges). The figure of "reflexive pole” endorses the conception of the environmental strategy as a liminal site embedded in a specific device through the exercise of a “committed reflexivity”.The project used as an empirical basis for this intervention research, funded by the French Global Environment Facility (GEF), was designed in an original approach between Albanian Rural Development Agency (MADA) and Mediterranean intergovernmental organization (CIHEAM-IAMM) having agreed to "embark" a research function in a concrete process of building Signs of quality and origin (SIQO) for local productions from pastoral and agricultural systems and collection activities of non-timber products. The hypothesis advanced by the project "BiodivBalkans" (2012-2016) was that this process can promote a sustainable environmental management of agro-silvopastoral Albanian territories.This inquiry – led in a pragmatic perspective – is based on a situated narrative and description of the project’s developments studied as a strategic device, to which is attached the activity of the “reflexive pole”. Doing so, we emphasize the cognitive, organizational and strategic nature of conceiving the frames of environmental action in a situated device related to an evolving biodiversity regime. Beyond the irreducibility of this experience, the added value of this research work is twofold.From a practical standpoint, we propose to consider the “reflexive pole’s” activity as an additional modality to design and implement ODA environmental projects. We derive three invariants of this biodiversity mainstreaming activity (i.e.: framing, shaping, using), which designate three modes of exerting a “committed reflexivity”. Theses strategic operations of different nature and conceptual scales are to design the environmental dimension of collective action devices in complex, ambiguous and adverse universe.From an analytical standpoint then, theorizing the “reflexive pole’s” strategic activity allows us to redefine the status of the environmental actor as proposed by the Strategic Environmental Management Analysis (SEMA) in an actor-centric perspective. We used the concepts of “knowledge brokering" and» boundary organization” to enlarge this focus with a socio-cognitive dimension and build theoretical foundations to further explore the cognitive, procedural and located dimension of environmental changes in collective action devices.