Abstract
There is increasing political interest in the use of voluntary agreements (VA) as a policy instrument. The attraction has grown also in environmental policy, VAs are expected to be less costly, more effective and more cost-efficient than regulation. Using a realist review methodology, our analysis focuses on the effect of contextual factors and mechanisms on private forest owners' willingness to enter into formal voluntary nature conservation agreements. The framework we use to analyse the effects includes: forest owner characteristics, forest attributes, institutional context and process, advisors and other forest owners, and contract design, for contextual factors – and economic attitudes, environmental attitudes, sense of autonomy, sense of justice and fairness, trust as well as knowledge, for mechanisms. The analysis allowed merging findings from different types of VAs in varying contexts in a systematized way, and consolidating evidence of how the mechanisms influence the programme implementation process, and its outcome. 43 reviewed articles, from an originally retrieved set of 2231 papers, provide evidence for environmental attitudes supporting willingness to enter into an agreement. Environmental attitudes are strengthened by forest owners' wishes to protect a heritage, suggesting considerable influence through personal, emotional attachment to the forest. This finding shows the central role played by sense of autonomy, with economic compensation also importantly affecting the willingness to enter a VA. Along with these results, the developed comprehensive analytical framework shows how VAs can become more effective if tailored for different contexts and types of forest owners.
Highlights
There is growing political interest in using voluntary agreements (VA) and compensation for nature conservation in privately owned forests and on private land (Mantymaa et al, 2009; Wunder et al, 2018)
In this literature review we focus on how VAs work primarily in Finland, Norway and Sweden, which are all part of the boreal forest belt and have a dominance of private forest ownership
The overall research question we seek to answer is: what contextual factors influence the willingness of private forest owners to enter into formal voluntary nature conservation agreements and which mechanisms are trig gered? We focus on six mechanisms that we found central to under standing how forest owners respond to VA programmes: economic attitudes, environmental attitudes, sense of autonomy, sense of justice and fairness, knowledge as well as trust
Summary
There is growing political interest in using voluntary agreements (VA) and compensation for nature conservation in privately owned forests and on private land (Mantymaa et al, 2009; Wunder et al, 2018). Forest-protection VAs have been empirically studied using ap proaches from different disciplines including economics, political sci ence, forest and environmental science To synthesise this knowledge, and to analyse the effect – and how the effect takes shape – we conduct a realist review of published literature. We focus on six mechanisms that we found central to under standing how forest owners respond to VA programmes: economic attitudes, environmental attitudes, sense of autonomy, sense of justice and fairness, knowledge as well as trust These mechanisms will be activated in different ways depending on the contextual factors, which in our analysis include forest owner characteristics; forest attributes; institutional context and process, advisors and other forest owners as well as contract design
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