Public Participation and Environmental Justice in Biodiversity Governance in Finland, Greece, Poland and the UK Riikka Paloniemi, 1 * Evangelia Apostolopoulou, 2 Joanna Cent, 3 Dimitrios Bormpoudakis, 4,5 Anna Scott, 5 Malgorzata Grodzińska-Jurczak, 3 Joseph Tzanopoulos, 4 Miska Koivulehto, 1 Agata Pietrzyk-Kaszyńska 3 and John D. Pantis 6 1 Environmental Policy Centre, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, Finland 2 Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK 3 Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland 4 Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, UK 5 School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, Centre for Agri-Environmental Research, University of Reading, UK 6 Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece ABSTRACT The novel articulations between the state, markets and civil society arising from the shift to networked environmental governance highlight the importance of creating equal participation opportunities. Relevant questions from an environmental justice perspective are not only who participates, but also with whom, in what, why and how. In this paper, we explore public par- ticipation in biodiversity governance that has emerged after the initial designation of a Natura 2000 network in Finland, Greece, Poland and the UK by focusing on distributive and proce- dural justice. Our analysis, based on focus groups and document analysis, shows that new par- ticipatory arrangements have taken the modes of project-based, market, interest group and e-governance. These arrangements have been marked by problems in power and knowledge sharing, and in the distribution of conservation costs and benefits, reflecting serious deficits regarding environmental justice. Calls for public participation and wider stakeholder engage- ment in conservation across Europe should be followed by an acknowledgment of the diversity of perspectives, conflicting interests and social positions and their integration into biodiversity governance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Received 5 December 2013; revised 24 October 2014; accepted 3 November 2014 Keywords: biodiversity conservation; biodiversity policy; distributive justice; European integration; procedural justice; stakeholder Introduction I N RECENT DECADES, BIODIVERSITY GOVERNANCE HAS BECOME A MULTIFACETED AND CONTROVERSIAL PROCESS (Gibson et al., 2000; Pelosi et al., 2010; Apostolopoulou and Paloniemi, 2012; Paloniemi et al., 2012) occurring at and operating across multiple scales (Buizer et al., 2011; Kok and Veldkamp, 2011; Stead, 2014). Governance as an arrangement of governing beyond the state can be defined as the socially innovative institutional or *Correspondence to: Riikka Paloniemi, Environmental Policy Centre, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), PO Box 140, 00251 Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: riikka.paloniemi@ymparisto.fi Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Environmental Policy and Governance Env. Pol. Gov. 25, 330–342 (2015) Published online 17 March 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/eet.1672