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This article focuses on the participatory rights of local people living in the areas of extensive oil industry operations in the Izhemskii district of the Komi Republic in Russia. The district has long been suffering from oil leaks and resulting negative environmental impacts. Lukoil-Komi bought the business directly after the Soviet era and inherited the ecological threats related to old and rusty pipelines. Lukoil-Komi has promised to put things in order, but a great deal remains to be done.This article scrutinizes how statutory law and private governance interact in protecting the participatory rights of local people living in the vicinity of oil production in Komi. First, we evaluate what participatory rights Russian legislation guarantees to local people when oil production arrives in a new area or when new wells are being explored or opened. Second, we elaborate how the major oil company in the region – Lukoil-Komi – fulfills its corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the area of participatory rights and how local people feel about their possibility to exercise their participatory rights. As participatory rights, we discuss both procedural justice with public hearings and distributive justice in the form of benefit-sharing between the company and local community. The wider perspective on participation is due to Russian CSR practices. In Russia, companies tend to earn their Social License to Operate (SLO) through benefit-sharing, often within private governance. This practice is based on the social partnership agreements between authorities and companies. These contracts have path-dependent features resembling earlier Soviet solutions. The same can be claimed to apply to a wider SLO with more focus on local communities. We argue that Lukoil-Komi has not yet been able to achieve an SLO (local acceptance) due to the lack of participatory rights and continuing environmental problems. Most local people are not willing to trade a clean environment and participatory rights for the social benefits the company offers. However, the social partnership agreement concluded between Lukoil-Komi and a local NGO, Izvatas, could be a step forward in achieving a local SLO.

The article examines the role of public participation rights in the Finnish forest planning system and considers the need for improvement, with a particular focus on private forests. Public participation is approached here as one of the tools for achieving social and ecological sustainability in forestry. The paper shows that public participation rights are very limited in the forest planning and management schemes in Finland. Among other things, access to environmental information is restricted, which is exceptional in modern environmental and natural resource law. The article concludes that there is a need to strengthen the participatory elements in forest planning if the aim is to improve environmental and social sustainability in forestry.

Finnish fisheries are regulated first and foremost by the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and quotas determined by the EU. Certain fisheries have also been certified according to the international Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard. The aim of this article is to study the added value that the MSC brings to the governance of the ecological sustainability of Finnish marine fisheries. This is achieved by scrutinizing how the MSC addresses the ecosystem approach and how different experts and stakeholders see the role of the MSC in contributing to sustainable fisheries. We endeavor to unravel the sustainability benefits that non-state regulations can offer for a fishery in the Baltic Sea that is heavily regulated and controlled by the EU. We found that the MSC has led to some minor positive changes in fishing and that the indirect support the MSC provides when following scientific advice is even more important.