Biodiversity—a new spatial challenge for Finnish agri-environmental policies?

Abstract

Biodiversity has not only become one of the basic environmental policy objectives in both international and national political arenas but also an elementary part of the general discourse of global environmental change. Biodiversity has been claimed to give a new meaning to ‘nature’. Has it also changed the way countryside and agriculture are constructed in the context of agri-environmental policymaking? This paper explores how nature in the form of biodiversity and rurality are constructed in the context of Finnish agri-environmental policy-making and ‘biodiversity policies’. Lefebvre's (1991) theory of space is used as an analytical framework to show that rurality is produced in policy processes both as an image and as a concrete geo-social reality. Empirical results are based on interviews with members of Finnish networks in the domain of agricultural biodiversity (government officials, researchers and members of interest organisations and NGOs) and on analysis of policy documents. The key focus is on the outcomes of policy and the difficulties with scale the policymakers were facing when trying to integrate biodiversity into the Finnish Agri-Environmental Scheme.