Why do some institutional arrangements succeed? Voluntary protection of forest biodiversity in Southwestern Finland and of the Golden Eagle in Finnish Lapland

Despite global, regional, and national policy efforts, biodiversity is on the decline worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critically important institutional and social features of those economic instruments that in practice motivate beneficiaries and stakeholders to protect biodiv...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature Conservation
Main Authors: Hiedanpää, Juha, Borgström, Suvi
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://zenodo.org/record/575262
https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.7.6497
Description
Summary:Despite global, regional, and national policy efforts, biodiversity is on the decline worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critically important institutional and social features of those economic instruments that in practice motivate beneficiaries and stakeholders to protect biodiversity. The paper presents two case studies: the natural values trading (NVT) scheme in southwestern Finland and the protection of the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) in Finnish Lapland. NVT builds upon the voluntary actions of landowners, payments for ecosystem services, and a fixed-term period of protection (ten years). The protection of the golden eagle is based on tolerance payments. This paper combines legal studies and institutional economics to abduct the reasons underlying the success of both cases. In both cases, institutional entrepreneurship promoted the confidence of stakeholders and beneficiaries in the schemes and the consequent trust amongst the agents encouraged the actors to modify their behaviour.