Similarities and differences in the frames

The same interviewee also noted that compromising between timber harvesting and nature conservation requires that there is something left to compromise over. Otherwise the so-called compromise might mean that the original goal is lost altogether:

“Because forest conservation was left to the last minute, from the nature’s perspective in many respects, then compromises are a bad solution at that point.

I mean, if forestry already has 97 % of the forest land, why would we need to compromise on the remaining per cent?”(NHSK)

Because this frame focuses mainly on the role of the internal, structural problems of Metsähallitus, there was less talk about the role of public participation or collaboration with stakeholder groups as a means of dealing with the conflict. Several conservation biologists maintain that public participation played a minor role in particularly in LEP, because local people had little knowledge of the forests that was not already known by the NHS. ENGOs were an exception to this rule, but their contact with NHS did not take place in the formal participatory meetings. Those who mentioned public participation/

collaboration as an important conflict management tool in the future perceived it not only as a way of collecting input from and making the stakeholders talk with each other, but more as a potential forum for widening stakeholders’ horizons, and making them see future perspectives beyond ”the view informed by the past and limited to today”

(NHSK). Metsähallitus should, it was maintained, act more as an environmental educator. But before any holistic, integrative views can be created from the multitude of stakeholder voices, one must first be created within Metsähallitus.

meant enormous progress, both in terms of ecological sustainability in forest management as well as in public participation. While they may look at the different curves, both frames share the idea that some compromises need to be made, and have already successfully been made. Therefore the continuous campaigns by ENGOs are perceived as more and more unreasonable.

On the other hand, the most critical frames – Local Distress and Structural Conflict – while presenting opposite views on the substance of the conflict, also share one aspect.

They both criticise the political decision-making and the leadership of their respective organisations for leaving the local level employees alone in dealing with the old-growth forest conflict and with the integration of, not only timber harvesting and nature conservation, but also increasingly tight demands for profit. These frames tell not of integration of different goals through systematic, open and collaborative process, but instead of ad hoc decision-making, where power play, tight time constraints and lack of understanding for each other’s perspectives play a major role.

According to these critical frames, the logging planners and the conservation biologists at the local level in Kainuu have been the ones to find the practical solutions to situations, which are in fact are about policy-level issues. According to the NHS staff, it was they who needed to develop LEP practically from scratch, after the political decision to protect a major part of the old-growth forests through LEP had been made in 996. According to the logging planners, it has been they who have had the task of re-planning the logging for the coming years in order to make the ends meet when several harvest sites have, without prior warning, been put under moratorium during various phases of the conflict. And it is conservation biologists and logging planners who meet either around an office table, or in a forest, and need to make decisions on whether to log or not. The decisions that Figure 11. Internal Conflict frames tend to focus more on the Curve A whereas External Conflict frames emphasise the Curve B.

come from ‘above’ are never entirely in line with one other, and can, in the worse case, be mutually conflicting. Therefore, the final interpretation has always eventually been done at the local level and that has at times been very difficult. Both the conservation biologists and logging planners recounted that they had tried to involve the head office in the decision-making, but mostly to no avail:

“NHSK: But then we tried to take many issues to Tikkurila [headquarters], but very often the reply was that these issues have to be decided at the local level. In other words, Tikkurila very often withdrew from taking responsibility.

KR: And why did they do that?

NHSK: I don’t know that. They did not want to take a stand on something that they could later be held accountable for.”

Logging planners have found this particularly difficult to accept in cases where ENGOs have taken direct action in forests where logging has been going on. According to planners, logging sites are definitely not the places to carry out the reconciliation between nature conservation and forestry. The harvester drivers are private entrepreneurs with tight schedules and economic margins, and for them it is unacceptable and draining not to be able to carry out logging as planned. However, when the Laamasenvaara case (where a tree fell on one of the activists) was addressed in court, Metsähallitus argued that the harvester driver was an independent entrepreneur and hence Metsähallitus was not responsible for what had occurred at the logging site. An NHS employee criticised this line of argument in the following way:

“And eventually it should be, in principle it should, if the decision maker is nowhere else to be found then it should be the highest level that should take responsibility for the decisions. But as we could see in these, for example, forest…this activist logging in Kuhmo, there was no-one of those to whom the responsibility belong, who would have taken it.[…] and when the activist in no way was directing the protest against the harvester driver, or the owner of the harvester, she was protesting against the logging policy of Metsähallitus.[…] in this case it would have been honest, that “yes, we told him[harvester contractor]

to go there, but we don’t give a damn…let him deal with it on his own”

(NHSK9)

The question that arises from the very different ways that people within the state administration perceive the old-growth forest conflict and indeed the state forest administration as a whole is, how are these issues dealt with in the formal institutional framework regulating state forests and Metsähallitus. How is the reconciliation between biodiversity conservation and commercial forestry approached in the regulation? How are the role of NHS and the Forestry Division defined? How is the regulation implemented by the ministries and by Metsähallitus in its planning processes? Are there other informal norms that also affect the decision-making? These are the questions addressed in the following chapter.

8.3 Formal and informal institutions on biodiversity conservation and