Biodiversity Conservation Tenders in Forests: Moving from Theory to Reality

The New EU Forest Strategy for 2030 encourages member states to implement Payment for Ecosystem Services policies and explicitly references the Finnish METSO program as an instructive example. The METSO program gained international attention as a pilot forest conservation tender. In conservation tenders, forest owners make bids for the compensation requested to voluntarily set aside their forest for a period of time. In this paper, we analyze three case studies of European forest conservation tender programs along the lines of a novel analytical framework. Although conservation tenders have many conceptual advantages, the three case studies demonstrate that the practical implementation may not work in a textbook-style manner. Our analysis reveals that rather than mistakes in policy design, the three forest conservation tenders ran into issues of deficient vertical and horizontal policy integration, policy layering, and overly optimistic expectations on the time needed to set up and run a tender program.