‘What's in it for me?’ — Contrasting environmental organisations and forest owner participation as policies evolve

Stakeholder participation in forest policy processes has over years received political and scientific attention. This empirical study brings in a dynamic element, exploring how and why participation change as policies evolve. Two Norwegian policy cases serve to contrast participation by environmental organisations (ENGOs) and forest owner organisations (FOs) over time. The policy arrangement approach (PAA) is used as analytical framework, first, to explore changes in coalitions, rules of game, power constellations, and discourses for each of the policy cases. Second, an initial exploration is offered on how changes in the PAA dimensions affect the assessments of ‘what's in it for me’ for ENGOs versus FOs. The results indicate that when standards for sustainable forest management are implemented, the value for ENGOs to participate in standard revision is decreasing, while in forest protection, the ENGOs chose to participate in a coalition requesting more money for voluntary protection, even after being excluded from identifying interesting areas for protection. Combining evolving policies and participation based on ‘what's in it for me’ help explain why participation changes over time. The findings provide alternative perspectives on former work presenting continued participation as a challenge and important messages related to future forest policy analysis.