Competing discourses of the forest guide forest-owners’ ideas about the proper forest use and about the need to conserve biodiversity. In this paper, we examine how five predefined forest discourses (re)produced by Finnish forest owners treat nature and biodiversity conservation. Our critical discourse analysis combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative multivariate methods (NMDS). The data consists of in-depth interviews with 24 Finnish forest-owners. The five forest discourses formed a gradient from an absence of nature issues to a profound ecological pondering with deep affection and responsibility for nature. The discourses in between these two ends of the gradient contained narration on personal experiences but lacked the moral responsibility and deep theorizing typical of the nature-oriented discourse. The nature-oriented discourse proposed forest uses where the needs of nature were raised to a determining role whereas the other four discourses adhered to the standard economy-driven forest management paradigm. Both nature and the forest-owners with a strong relationship with nature appeared marginalised in the prevailing order of the forest discourses. The discoursal conditions that we evidenced did not favour biodiversity conservation among forest-owners. The results thus call for active forest policy that aims to transform the prevailing order of the discourses, but also tries to overcome the discoursal hinders for biodiversity conservation within the prevailing order.

This study aims to present a holistic image of the strategic development needs and potential solutions within the Finnish non-timber forest product (NTFP) business sector and demonstrate a new hybrid methodology for collaborative strategy formulation. The perceived challenges and solutions were collected with the 635 group-working method in a nationwide series of NTFP actor workshops. The analysis applied the Strategic Option Development and Analysis (SODA) approach and the formal network analysis. Business actors emphasised two complex and interrelated aims of development at the core of the business activity: (1) to improve the profitability of the NTFP business and (2) to facilitate the growth of the sector. The present bottleneck is perceived in the raw material acquisition and productising, and many wider development themes, such as business logic and sustainability, received little attention.

Creating common ground among research groups is a prerequisite for scientifically sound case study research, especially in multi-national and multi-disciplinary research projects. Therefore, this paper proposes a new procedure for case study selection: stochastic cognitive mapping (sCM). sCM complements the previously illustrated conceptual content cognitive mapping (3CM) with email enquiry on concepts and their interconnections, simple multi-attribute rating and stochastic estimation of priorities. The procedure was applied to select case studies in a study on the role of community-based initiatives (CBIs) in societal change towards sustainability. The procedure performed well, based on project members’ evaluations, and enabled them to consistently identify a map and ranked list of criteria for selecting case initiatives. Researchers of the project had two to some extent exclusive orientations towards case selection: sampling and searching strategies, i.e. emphasis on the representativeness of a case set or on the features that interesting and useful study cases should possess. Strategies were integrated and CBIs selected through the sequence of snowball, random, and purposive samplings. Moreover, the method and the criteria list are adaptable to support comparable studies across diverse contexts.