Browsing by Subject "kuntametsät"

Urban forests have recreational values in daily life of people. Planning the use of urban forest is considered through social, ecological, economical and cultural sustainability goals. Besides a forest plan that focuses on concrete forest use, many Finnish municipalities also have a forest strategy. Forest strategy gives a longer perspective for the goals of the use of the forest. Public participation is used as part of the forest planning in municipalities in varying levels. This master’s thesis focuses on the use of different public participation methods in forest planning in Finnish municipalities. The main focus is to explore what kind of methods/ combinations of methods are used and how the municipalities’ forestry experts view the main benefits, problems and chances of improvement in the used practices. The study is carried out as a qualitative study, interviewing forestry experts from 14 Finnish municipalities and analyzing the interviews using qualitative content analysis. The interviews are targeted to municipalities, that have made a forest plan and used public participation in the planning process. The results show that the participatory processes varied a lot between municipalities and each municipality had made their own way of including participatory methods into the forest planning process. However, the methods used were mostly the same, the most used being different kinds of online surveys and surveys using spatial information, common meetings, and forest walks. Two of the municipalities used participatory planning, that involved stakeholders in the planning group. It’s more conventional to use lighter participatory methods, that don’t require as much involvement from the participants. According to the interviews, the main benefits brought by public participation are trust-building, informing residents and having an insight into the public opinion, along with reaching an approved plan. The main problems considering public participation are limited resources and time for the planning, single strong opinions that dominate the conversation, conflicting interests and skills for executing public participation.The ways to improve public participation process included more thorough planning of the process and sufficient amount of time for it, using participatory experts thorugh a consult firm or from municipality’s own workforce, explaining and visualizing effects of forest use for the public and more active ways to inform the public.