The limits of devolving sustainable development to the local level: The case of the Greenbelt of Fennoscandia initiative

Abstract

This article investigates how the framing of nature conservation in terms of sustainable development both enables and constrains participation at the grassroots level. The Green Belt of Fennoscandia, an initiative to develop a transnational ecological network between Finland, Russia and Norway, is used as a case study. A desk study and 40 interviews with participants of two regional working groups from this initiative show how the mobilisation of the concept of sustainability encourages actors in rural areas to become leaders of projects in favour of both nature conservation and economic development. This research also describes how the lack of state engagement and potential conflicts between regional and national levels can discourage these actors to commit to the initiative. This research refines previous work on the reduction of the role of the state in conservation, illustrating the scalar dynamics of sustainable development implementation in a European rural context. It provides material to inform the governance of large-scale conservation projects, by highlighting how an approach that aims to boost local participation can in fact discourage it, if the reduction of the role of the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

From crisis to sustainability: The politics of knowledge production on rural Europe

“…Askins, 2009; Pigg, 1996) has shown how translocal relations and discourses (i.e. scalar connections) have an important role in constructing rural place, policy measures and notions of sustainability (Florin, 2023), even when these connections are not immediately obvious. They can manifest themselves in ways that are discordant, not easily visible and yet can have very material effects for rural areas and everyday lives (Arora‐Jonsson, 2009).…”