Why protection of biodiversity creates conflict – Some evidence from the Nordic countries

Abstract

Protection of biodiversity on private forest land often yields conflict. In standard economic theory, disputes about compensation and compensation level are held forward as the main reason for conflict. We discuss the reasons for conflict in protection of biodiversity in forests also including institutional explanations and use survey data on Nordic forest owners to empirically explore different hypotheses for why conflict appears. Type of process and level of communication stand out as important elements when explaining forest owners' attitudes towards forest protection. If one wants to lessen or avoid conflict, offering forest owners extended possibilities to participate in the protection process is important.

Public perceptions of planning objectives for regional level management of wild reindeer in Norway

“…between the municipalities in the steering committee for the regional plans and the county governor. This may reflect a typical feature of devolved management systems set up to handle multi-scale societyenvironment tasks, namely lack of communication through the process, lack of trust and different interpretations of the goals (Armitage et al 2009;Bergseng and Vatn 2009).…”

Conflicting Values in Rural Planning: A Multifunctionality Approach through Social Multi-criteria Evaluation

“…It is important to include all the relevant stakeholders from the point of view of the quality of the information and the efficiency of the agreements, considering that all opinions and interests have the right to participate [52,53]. Thus, it is necessary that the participatory processes have a wide range of participants from different areas [54,55], also combining local and scientific knowledge [56][57][58], which will ultimately result in the legitimacy, acceptance and transparency of the process itself [59][60][61], and in the social learning derived from it [26,62,63]. …”

Integrating biodiversity conservation into forestry: an empirical analysis of institutional adaptation

“…Viitala 1996, Viitala and Hänninen 1998, Schraml 2005. Omission of the organizational factors in the analyses of small scale private land management can possibly be explained also by the continued focus on land-owners as critical targets of forest policy and integrated conservation (Karppinen 1998, Kurttila et al 2001, Uliczka et al 2004, Fischer and Bliss 2006, Bergseng and Vatn 2009, Kauneckis and York 2009. Despite the land-owners' heavy dependence on extension and planning services provided by public and private organizations (Wolf andHufnagl-Eichiner 2007, Hujala et al 2007), the ways in which these organizations develop the service functions have received little attention.…”