Goals for public participation implied by sustainable development, and the preparatory process of the Finnish National Forest Programme
Introduction
In 1999, the Government of Finland made a Decision-in-Principle on the National Forest Programme 2010, which had been prepared through a multi-stakeholder process (Finland's National Forest Programme, 1999). National forest programmes have been considered a significant policy tool for achieving sustainable forest management in the Agenda 21 of the Environment and Development Conference in 1992 as well as in the consecutive policy processes. In the last session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests in 1994 (IPF, 1997), national forest programmes gained the high status in the international forest policy statements and discourse that they still have (Pülzl and Rametsteiner, 2002). At the European level, the importance of National Forest Programmes was re-emphasised in the Vienna Resolution (MCPFE, 2003), where the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe principles of National Forest Programmes in Europe were formalised. Along with the increased international recognition of national forest programmes as tools for achieving sustainable forest management, the significance of participation in the preparation and implementation of the programmes has grown.
Various cultural and normative systems have given numerous justifications for participation in a policy process. In fact, most political systems acknowledge some forms of participation, and the Western democracies maintain an even more defined set of shared goals for participation in a justified policy process. These goals are by no means fixed, but evolve with the societal change. A significant contributor to some aspects in the discourse on legitimate participation has been the policy process of sustainable development. Public participation is an inherent component of sustainable development as it is defined in the major policy documents1 (WCED, 1987, UN Agenda 21, 1992). However, although the term “public participation” is recurrently referred to in these documents, the form of participation that sustainable development should involve remains obscure.
Thus, the first objective of this paper is to define the different goals for participation implied by the documents of sustainable development. This definition is conducted at the theoretical level of political philosophy and it combines the latest discussion on the theory of democracy and political participation with discussion on the political content and normative claims of sustainable development. This combination is rather seminal in the field of political theory. We start by examining the various elements in political theory that can be assigned to participation, with particular attention to public participation and its distinction from other forms of participation. Based on these elements we develop three categories of participation goals that can be defined to be inherent to sustainable development.
Our second objective is to analyse public participation in the latest National Forest Programme process in Finland, through empirical analysis of the public forums2 organised in the process, and through a review of the participation process more generally. The qualitative content analysis of the public forum participation is based on a set of archived memoranda on the public forums, and the other material used are the written statements made during the process and the background document of the Programme (Kansallinen metsäohjelma 2010—Taustaraportti, 1999). The third objective of the paper is to analyse whether the goals of participation we define have determined the actual policy processes.
Our theoretical-empirical analysis allows us to compare the participation goals inferred from the sustainable development policies and the actual forms of participation embedded in the Finnish National Forest Programme, and to make statements on how well the Finnish National Forest Programme met the sustainable development goals, which the process was committed to (Kansallinen metsäohjelma 2010—Taustaraportti, 1999).
We start by contemplating the theoretical basis for political participation.
Section snippets
Political participation, who and how?
Claims for participation are often made in terms of democracy. The basic principles that are usually seen to characterise democracy are ‘popular control’ and ‘political equality’.3
Finland's forests and forest policy
Forests have a significant role in Finland's culture and economy and at present, forestry products account for around a quarter of all exports (Finnish Forest Research Institute, 2003). In addition to the national economic significance of forests, the other factor that is illustrative of Finland's forest policy is the forest ownership structure dominated by a large number of non-industrial private holdings (Karppinen et al., 2002). According to Van Kooten et al. (1998) these two factors,
National Forest Programme 2010
The National Forest Programme 2010 was initiated by the government, and approved in 1999. The assignment of the Programme (Kansallinen metsäohjelma 2010—Taustaraportti, 1999) highlighted the Rio Forest Principles and the IPF recommendations on national forest programmes. The assignment included principles for the preparation of the Programme: openness, co-operation and comprehensiveness. All stakeholders and interest groups were to be included in the preparation, and any conflicts should be
Analysis of public forums
We will concentrate our detailed analysis here on the agenda setting and formulation stages of the preparation, as these are those where the sustainable development objectives (the vision) of the Programme could be defined. We also discuss the status of legitimation in relation to these stages.
The agenda-setting process started formally through assigning Working Groups. This left the formulation of sustainable development in forest policy to emerge during the process. The Working Groups (Table 1
Results: argumentation
Based on the memoranda, the forums differed in terms of argumentation. However, they followed certain patterns. The regional forums, hosted by the Regional Forestry Centres, were focussed on economic activities in the forests and regional dependence on these activities. The interest group forums discussed particular issues at a more general, national level. The themes that came up in the forums are listed in Table 3, and described in more detail below.
Based on the analysed documents, timber
Discussion: little new information and interests in a legitimate process
While the development of policy objectives and programmes aiming at sustainable development includes the inherent assumption that participation of all concerned is important, this can be organised in a number of ways. We discuss here the contribution of the public forums, as a new form of participation, to the Finnish National Forest Programme process against our developed goals of participation: generating new information, incorporating new interests and achieving public agreement.
Conclusion
Out of what we called “the sustainable development goals for participation”, the goal of legitimation was the most applicable in the Finnish National Forest Programme Preparation. As this preparation process was the first forest policy process applying public participation in this broad a manner, the pioneering work was not challenged significantly during the process.
On the other hand, this legitimation demonstrates itself solely through the sharing of the preparation effort. The reaching of
Acknowledgements
This article is based on work that was first presented in the 6th Nordic Conference on Environmental Social Sciences (NESS) in Turku in June 2003. We wish to thank Jonathan Tritter for valuable advice and Eeva Furman, Mikael Hildén, Jari Kuuluvainen and Mikko Tervo as well as two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. Steven Wolf and William Lafferty also deserve thanks for their encouragement at the early stage of this work. The research was financially supported by the Academy of
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