Forest owner or shareholder? Ownership feelings in a jointly-owned forest

ABSTRACT

Parcelisation-induced fragmentation is a common development trend in forest ownership in many Western countries. In Finland, the idea of a jointly-owned forest (JOF) has been introduced to facilitate the effective management of forest resource in parcelised and fragmented forest owning contexts. A JOF is an area of combined holdings intended for the practice of sustainable forestry for the benefit of the shareholders. The establishment of JOFs alters the core idea of ownership as it diminishes individual forest owners’ ability to control their holdings. We suggest that the feelings of ownership are important, yet under researched, aspects in the development and operation of JOFs. In this study, we focus on these ownership feelings by asking what kind of owner types are associated with JOFs. We build a qualitative typology of four owner types which we named active owners, investors, legacy fosterers, and detached owners. Our study contributes to the discussion on JOFs by showing that shared ownership can incorporate a variety of owner types with different ownership feelings. We claim that the need to understand these different owner types is important to facilitate the development of tools and policy instruments that will contribute to the establishment and management of jointly-owned forests.

KEYWORDS:

• Forest ownership
• identity
• jointly-owned forest
• psychological ownership
• qualitative typology
• common forest ownership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Conflicts of interests

There are no conflicts of interests.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 According to the Finnish forest statistics, the number of forest holdings under 5 hectares and over 1000 hectares have been increasing, average holding size being 32 hectares and median 10 hectares (Luke 2023).

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted by following the Guidelines for ethical review in human sciences provided by Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK guidelines in 2019.