Road, forestry and regional planners' work for biodiversity conservation and public participation: a case study in Poland's hotspot regions

Abstract

We studied how regional, road and forestry planning sectors work to implement policies about biodiversity conservation and public participation. Evaluations were based on a normative model for planning derived from the existing international policies and relevant literature. Key planning actors were then interviewed with regard to their understanding of biodiversity and participation policies as well as ability to act and willingness to implement them. The results indicate several gaps in planning processes, for example, insufficient knowledge about biodiversity conservation and participation, limited resources and tools for planning of functional habitat networks and collaboration, poor connections between local and regional planning, and weakly developed public participation. The main problem for effective policy implementation seems to be related to planners' ability to act, which indicates that relatively low priority was given to provide resources for biodiversity conservation and public participation by the relevant units. We discuss our findings in relation to the implementation of environmental policies in the new EU countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

Keywords:

• policy implementation
• spatial planning
• landscape approach
• biodiversity conservation
• public participation

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by grants from TransportMistra's INCLUDE project, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS), the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Institute. The authors wish to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Our thanks also go to Kjell Andersson for producing a map of the study areas, and Sylvia Dovlén, Jacek Kozak and Grzegorz Mikusinski for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.