Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) is committed to conserving biodiversity, both in terms of natural and cultural legacies, and also to limiting biodiversity loss. Relevant policies have underlined the importance of considering ecological and social issues, as well as the complex relations between the two spheres in conservation of biodiversity. These policies have clear implications for all sectors responsible for planning for biodiversity conservation. In order to be consistent with international legislation, it is necessary to move beyond protected areas and include biodiversity conservation considerations in planning activities of various sectors, and also to involve relevant stakeholders in the planning process. This is in line with the landscape approach to planning that has recently been advocated in research and practical planning. The landscape approach has a holistic perspective that encompasses both ecological and social considerations. This thesis focuses on the implementation of policies regarding biodiversity conservation and public participation; that is, the ecological and social dimensions of spatial planning in landscapes. In particular, I examine the role of people, such as planners implementing policies and other stakeholders who might influence biodiversity conservation. The studies within this thesis concern Poland and Sweden, and three sectors: regional, road and forestry planning. The thesis is comprised of four papers. Paper I deals with planners working to implement biodiversity and public participation policies. Paper II concentrates on the issues of stakeholder involvement in the Environmental Impact Assessment of road planning. Paper III investigates a specific conflict that influenced the conservation of biodiversity in an important biodiversity hotspot. Paper IV is a conceptual paper that discusses the tools used to integrate ecological and social dimensions when implementing the European Landscape Convention. The studies included in this thesis reveal that successfully implementing biodiversity conservation and public participation policies may require more than just ecological knowledge about how biodiversity should be maintained, and more than just formal guidelines regarding how the public should be treated in the planning process. In addition, the role of people who may influence the planning and decision making processes is crucial. Accordingly, there is a need for two key developments. Firstly, planners and the general public should be properly educated about conservation-related issues. Secondly, various incentives should be introduced that influence the behaviour and, in the longer term, the attitudes of the people who may affect biodiversity.

Many natural resources have degraded and collapsed despite being managed under rigorous institutional frameworks set up to ensure rational exploitation. Path dependency of dysfunction institutions has been suggested as an explanation for such undesired outcomes. We explore the role of path dependency in natural resource management by studying a 100-year evolution of Swedish fisheries. We rely on three main types of original longitudinal data collected for the period 1914–2016: (A) policy documents, (B) government spending on management and subsidies, and (C) catch and fleet data. Our analysis contrasts the periods before and after the Swedish entrance into the European Union (1995) because this marks the year when fisheries policy became beyond the direct influence of the Swedish government. We uncover four pieces of evidence suggesting the existence of a path dependent dynamic in the pre-EU period: (1) despite increasing insights on the vulnerability of fish stocks to overexploitation, national policy goals in relation to fisheries continuously promoted incompatible goals of social and economic growth but without any reference to the sustainability of the biological resources; (2) the same policy instruments were used over long periods; (3) actor constellations within the fisheries policy subsystem were stable over time; (4) neither political regime nor macroeconomic variables and fisheries performance (industry production, oil price, landing values) could explain observed temporal variation in subsidies. We conclude that key policy actors in the pre-EU period formed an "iron triangle" and thereby prevented necessary policy changes. These national reinforcing feedbacks have been weakened since EU entrance, and the indicators for path dependency show broader involvement of stakeholders, a shift in spending, and policy goals that now explicitly address ecological sustainability.

Public catering can have a considerable environmental and educational impact. A scenario of more legume and less meat consumption in Sweden was in the present study used as a tool to explore the possibilities of Swedish public school meals to become more sustainable. Strong structuration theory provided a focus on organisational structure and stakeholder influence, enabling a holistic view of the issue at hand. A literature review, on the topics of successful implementation of sustainability projects within public catering and individual agency within school meals, provided a knowledge base from which an online survey and a guide for complementary interviews were built. The survey was aimed at municipal dietary managers and assessed their experiences of working with sustainable school meals and their attitudes towards the dietary scenario. Furthermore, the survey tried out a way of measuring how much legumes and meat are served in school canteens. The complementary interviews focused on individual actors' perceived agency to act for sustainable change. The results suggest that the study participants in general have both the knowledge and interest to make school meals more sustainable. They also saw the more legumes dietary scenario as desirable. Complicating factors are that the priorities of catering organisations and schools are often not well aligned, and resources are lacking to work on collaborations to improve this. It is also often unclear who has the responsibility to make sure teaching on sustainability is carried over from the classroom to the canteen. Individual agents with a high motivation to make positive change can be important drivers of sustainability projects, but for a change such as significantly greener school meals to take place, a whole food culture needs to change. Educational efforts and finding ways of engaging multiple stakeholders in the decisions are needed to this end. Unambiguous political goals, with adequate action plans, would give structure to the work on more sustainable school meals. Finding ways of quantifying and comparing sustainability efforts between municipalities would draw attention to the importance of the matter. The approach that was tried out in the present study however proved to be too impractical to use.