Neoliberal pathways to the bioeconomy: Forest land use institutions in Chile, Finland, and Laos

Juha Hiedanpää, Sabaheta Ramcilovik-Suominen and Matti Salo

Forest Policy and Economics, 2023, vol. 155, issue C

Abstract: Global capitalism has changed the Earth system to the extent that the current epoch is called the Anthropocene. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land use change has played a crucial role in this profound functional shift in the Earth system. The Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and its follow-up processes have insisted the same regarding the persisting decline in biodiversity. To shed light on the institutional aspects of land use change and the transformation towards the bioeconomy, we focus on three countries – Chile, Finland, and Laos, showing (i) how these historically very different societies have designed their land use institutions in recent decades, and (ii) what kind of bioeconomy and biosociety these institutional changes seem to presuppose. Our study's timespan is about fifty years, and the analysis is based on our ongoing research in the countries and the content analysis of legal and policy documents in them. These countries obviously differ regarding their basic constitutional and institutional structure and purposes in land use policy processes. We illuminate similarities and differences in authoritative and authorised transactions and discuss, from the perspective of classical institutional theory, how the state and property are entangled in power, how nature is not understood as a common good and public property, and how the negative liberty and economic conception of democracy is prevalent.

Keywords: Institutional change; Land use; Biodiversity; Bioeconomy; Biosociety; Neoliberalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934123001363
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:155:y:2023:i:c:s1389934123001363

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2023.103041

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().