Forestry and urban green space governance experiences rapid changes due to bottom up environmental pressure and top down changes of legislation. To deepen our understanding of crafting preferable environmental reactions towards environmental pressure, we introduced the perspective of environmental street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) and explored it using Oliver’s strategic response framework. Drawing from case studies on the governance of the moose and urban green space in Poland, we investigated the complex and mediating sphere of SLB “policy intentions” in environmental governance. We argue that SLBs can distance themselves from new expectations if these are perceived as “socially constructed” and potentially disturbing for SLBs’ professional routines. Such limited or moderated reactions can be a coping mechanism of SLBs trying to balance a complex landscape of various, even contradictory pressures. Our findings break the monolithic-type image of a ‘decision-maker’ into complex web of interrelations between administrative units and political structures. They also suggest a need of new forms of environmental (post-) bureaucracy to reinforce social trust and to deal with ambiguities of nature.

Poland was one of the first countries of Central and Eastern Europe with stable wolf populations to effectively introduce year-round protection of the species. This paper traces the process of policy change using institutional theory as an organizational perspective. Based on the analysis of data from desk research and semi-structured interviews, we propose a model of institutional change and argue that in the 1990s, environmental activists and wildlife biologists successfully used a political window of opportunity connected with socioeconomic transformation after 1989 and managed to induce the government to move the species from the domain of hunting to the domain of nature conservation. The new policy, informed by an ecological paradigm, diverged from the historical path dominated by hunters and the vision of the wolf as a pest and a hunting target. The improved protection led to the numerical growth of Poland's wolves and ultimately to their westward expansion.

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