Private forest owners’ sense of landownership: Motives, influential factors and landscape context: Fid-Bau Portal

Private forest owners’ sense of landownership: Motives, influential factors and landscape context

Andabaka, Marijana / Teslak, Krunoslav / Ficko, Andrej

Highlights • Psychological landownership (PL) has been neglected in landscape research. • Forest owners’ motives for PL are having a place to dwell and building self-identity. • Management duration and work with young forest stands strengthen PL. • Regional variations and concentrations of PL indicate hotspots/coldspots. • PL is a strong barrier to land degradation but it also hinders timely inheritance.

Abstract Legal ownership of land defines the formal relationship between a landowner and land. Besides legal ownership, there is also psychological ownership which landowners can develop toward land. Despite the abundant literature on the relationships between landowners and land, it remains unclear under which circumstances a sense of ownership over land occurs and what impacts individual feelings may have on landscape dynamics if aggregated or scaled up. Building upon the psychological ownership theory, we interviewed 442 private forest owners in Croatia about the benefits of landownership. By using a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) structural equation model and local spatial autocorrelation statistics, we 1) analyzed whether landownership benefits correlate to three motives for psychological ownership, i.e. having a place, efficacy and effectance, and self-identity; 2) analyzed the factors stimulating the motives; and 3) located the areas of spatial concentration of psychological landownership (i.e. hotspots/coldspots). Landownership benefits showed a strong association with the corresponding motives indicating that private forest owners experience landownership as a connection between the self and forest. Physical work in the forest and tending young forests increase psychological landownership. The land tenure system and duration of ownership plays no role. The biggest hotspot appeared in the most developed area, possibly preventing land transfer. Coldspots, in contrast, emerged across the country, pointing to land which could potentially change ownership after the land market regulation expires in 2023. The findings expand the understanding of land possession beyond the dis(investment) paradigm and help predict hotspots of land transfers at local to regional scales.