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This study explores how local communities reflect on institutional frameworks and protected area governance in two national parks (NPs) with similar nature values in Estonia and Russia, and aims to understand the role of value systems in these interactions. It is based on 50 in-depth interviews with a broad range of stakeholders, and a desktop analysis of relevant regulation and plans. Interview questions reflect on various aspects of well-being (including fairness of governance solutions), awareness of NPs’ function and restrictions, related value aspects, and covered basic personal data needed to interpret the interviews. The study reconfirms the pivotal role of social justice as a driver of wellbeing. In particular, it articulates the significance of value systems playing the role of filters between governance inputs and specific management activities of communities. It underlines the vulnerability of such systems at a community level, most of all to the impacts related to various instances of “centralization”. They are manifested through the choice of restrictive measures and top-down arrangements at the expense of transparency and inclusiveness (in Russia), as well as through the removal of governance autonomy from NPs and transferring monitoring and enforcement functions to local communities without clear mandates or sufficient capacity (in Estonia).

Introduction Biodiversity protection in Belarus has a long history. The first protected area in the modern understanding of this term was established in Belarus in 1925. However, the institutional mechanisms for biodiversity protection were developed in Soviet times and the overall style of governance has remained largely unchanged since then. Private property in its conventional form was introduced only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990^91. Even now, however, privatized land is restricted to small domestic patches. Furthermore, the development of civil society institutions has been frozen for more than a decade. Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union and growing influences of international organizations have initiated the transformation of environmental policy and adoption of new policy instruments by national governments that involve supranational and subnational actors. There are, as yet, rare cases of bottom-up initiation of policy change. The governance standards originating from the European Union (EU), United Nations (UN) agencies, and other international organizations are starting to have an impact on the national legislation. In this paper we trace the rise of the multilevel policy in biodiversity governance in Belarus. Our objective is to characterize the changes that have been introduced and the response of different administrative levels of the Belarusian governance structures, characterized by a long, highly hierarchical, tradition. We focus on the period from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the present day and we determine how changes in environmental policies emerge and develop where there is a strong centralized and hierarchical system monopolizing the political discourse.