Evolution in Finland's Forest Biodiversity Conservation Payments and the Institutional Constraints on Establishing New Policy

Abstract

This article analyzes the influence of the preexisting institutional basis on designing and implementing new biodiversity and ecosystem services policies. The way that regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions condition the currently popular payments for ecosystem services (PES) is analyzed by exploring the evolution of a championed forest biodiversity PES scheme in Finland. Our analysis of the evolution of the PES demonstrates several constraints on new policies. Based on policy documents and secondary material, we show how the policies that seemingly take effect through regulative institutional changes are conditioned by normative and cultural-cognitive institutions. Administrative and professional rigidities can be broken with a light policy experiment but for longer term governance development, radical institutional changes are necessary. The applied institutional framework demonstrates the analytical opportunities that attention to institutions generates for deepening the generally outcome-oriented evaluations of payments for ecosystem services policies.

Keywords:

• biodiversity conservation
• ecosystem services
• governance
• institutional analysis
• policy evolution

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ben Cashore, Frank Geels, Stuart Whitten, Anthea Coggan, Roldan Muradian, and Erik Gomez Baggethun for their ideas and comments on earlier versions and presentations of this article. Similarly, the two referees deserve thanks for their helpful comments. This research has been financed by the European Union FP7 project POLICYMIX (grant agreement 244065) and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment funded project METSO Assessment.