Bringing Back the Lost Biotopes: The Practice of Regional Biodiversity Management Planning in Finland

Abstract

In this paper, I tell a story of the making of a regional biodiversity management plan. The plan is one example of the new modes of operation that are being tried out in order to build linkages from individual to collective action in the implementation of agri-environmental policy in Finland. I argue that in order to understand the role of these management plans in the policy process, we need to reinstate the practices that have produced them. In this article, I analyse experiences gained from Vehmaa, Southwest Finland. I analyse the planning process as a collective experimentation and systematically examine how human and non-human elements associate together in a policy process. By following the actors involved, I analyse how they create associations between heterogeneous elements and create the linkages between individual and collective action. I show how it is the mutability of the plan and its ability to move across the different scales that makes it a powerful device in agri-environmental policy. I argue, however, that regional planning has not been able to challenge the boundary between productive space and nature created by the modern intensive agricultural systems. Although the aim of the planning was to blaze a trail for biodiversity, the associations created around ecologically valuable sites ended up enforcing the rather limited interpretation of biodiversity offered by agri-environmental policy and offered only little capacity for farmers to act. I close the article by situating the case study within a wider context of rural sustainability and discussing possible other ways of associating agriculture, rural livelihood and biodiversity.