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Despite global, regional, and national policy efforts, biodiversity is on the decline worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critically important institutional and social features of those economic instruments that in practice motivate beneficiaries and stakeholders to protect biodiversity. The paper presents two case studies: the natural values trading (NVT) scheme in southwestern Finland and the protection of the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) in Finnish Lapland. NVT builds upon the voluntary actions of landowners, payments for ecosystem services, and a fixed-term period of protection (ten years). The protection of the golden eagle is based on tolerance payments. This paper combines legal studies and institutional economics to abduct the reasons underlying the success of both cases. In both cases, institutional entrepreneurship promoted the confidence of stakeholders and beneficiaries in the schemes and the consequent trust amongst the agents encouraged the actors to modify their behaviour.

Climate change is expected to place biological diversity under increasing stress and threaten several species with extinction. To combat the threats caused by a changing climate, several policy documents and items of literature on conservation biology have proposed a number of proactive measures to help species and habitats to adapt to climate change. This article presents the results of an analysis of the capacity of the Finnish regulatory system to provide an effective framework for the measures proposed and the capacity of the regulatory system to enhance adaptive management, which is considered important in the era of climate change. The analysis reveals several weaknesses in the Finnish regulatory system. Legislative changes are likely to be needed to harness the existing conservation tools to support climate change adaptation measures.