From timber to carbon: Stakeholder acceptance of policy measures supporting forest management transition in Finland

Abstract

Policy acceptance is critical for legitimate and effective forest and climate policies. The acceptance of forest policies has been largely examined as an individual decision, especially among forest owners, based on attitudes, values and beliefs. To improve the usefulness of the concept of policy acceptance for political analysis, this article analyses the acceptance of key forest policy stakeholders and offers a novel contribution by integrating theoretical insights from the literatures on policy acceptance and the Advocacy Coalition Framework. Previous literature has revealed two influential stakeholder coalitions in Finnish forest policy. The two coalitions reflect highly polarized perspectives to forest use, foregrounding either economic interests or nature conservation. This article examines how climate mitigation targets are accepted by these two stakeholder coalitions as part of their policy strategies. Specifically, we analyze the acceptance of four climate policy measures: forest fertilization, land use change fee, carbon payment, and carbon off-setting. The empirical analysis is based on the qualitative content analysis of 23 stakeholder interviews. We find that the integration of climate mitigation targets may exacerbate conflicts between polarized coalition positions in Finnish forest policy, because stakeholders' policy acceptance is relationally constructed between the coalitions and strongly influenced by their resources related to political influence, as well as existing institutional settings. By situating policy acceptance within a three-level framework, this article shows that the ultimate decision to reject or approve a policy is likely to evolve throughout the different stages of the policy process depending on available resources.