Challenges and opportunities in biodiversity conservation on private land: an institutional perspective from Central Europe and North America

Abstract

Private land is gradually emerging as a global biodiversity conservation strategy for its potential to complement the existing protected area model in its attempt to halt the global biodiversity loss. However, involving private lands in conserving a public good face continuous challenges. While examining landowners' motivations for conserving their land is imperative to its success, it is equally important to assess how other stakeholder groups perceive private land conservation. In order to capture the diversity and contrasts in implementing private land conservation, this research focuses on investigating the managerial perspectives on the status of private land conservation in two countries: USA and Poland. The paper presents the results of twenty five in-depth interviews that were conducted in the two countries. The US context, with a longer history and experience, captured complex interactions and factors that influence private land conservation, including role of conservation policies, civic sector organizations, stakeholder collaboration, technical and financial support, and nonmonetary motivations of landowners. The Polish context however, was limited to the regulatory model and as such did not differentiate private land conservation from traditional protected areas. Additionally, the lack of voluntary initiatives along with adequate policies and lack of awareness on private land conservation at a national and local level contributed to limited scope and understanding on the subject. The two case studies highlight the context dependency of such a strategy and bring to focus some of the factors that should be addressed while adopting conservation on private land as a biodiversity conservation strategy.

Skepticism of state action in forest certification and voluntary set-asides: a Swedish example with two environmental offsetting options

“…Calls have also been made in the academic literature to reintroduce economic policy instruments as standard features in Swedish forest policy (e.g. Götmark et al 2009;Kamal et al 2015;Blanco et al 2015). Concurrently, other research has called for investigation into landscape scale approaches to environmental management measures (e.g.…”

Cross-cultural values and management preferences in protected areas of Norway and Poland

“…Before the political transition in1989, protected area designation, especially the designation of national parks, included private property expropriation. The current trend is toward reconciling conservation goals with human activities and property rights (e.g., on Natura 2000 sites), but past historical experiences are significantly affecting the effectiveness of these initiatives (Kamal et al, 2015).…”

A review of critical perspectives on private land conservation in academic literature

“…Concerns about prioritization and decision-making include excessive focus on quantity over quality (Kamal et al 2015b). Some conservation land trust organizations fail to include important factors in their acquisition decision-making, using individualistic and opportunistic parcel-level protection efforts rather than a systemic landscape-scale process (Ryan et al 2014).…”

“…Because PLC depends on landowners being willing and aware of opportunities, important habitats may not be represented (Ladle et al 2014;Ryan et al 2014). In Poland, for example, Kamal et al (2015b) report that landowners have little interest in conservation and that PLC may thus have limited feasibility. In Chile, most PPAs are concentrated in the south, so ecosystem coverage is unrepresentative (Tecklin and Sepulveda 2014).…”