Why do environmentalists not consider compromises as legitimate?

Environmental problems are often complex and involve fundamental value contradictions. There is a need to explore whether a well-designed process can contribute to a legitimate decision ‘closure’ even in the presence of value conflicts. We examine why environmentalists did not accept a compromise between industrial forestry and full conservation in the case of some forestry debates in Northern Finland and the Liperinsuo site in particular. Contradictory value positions between the environmentalists and the Finnish state forestry enterprise can only partly explain the lack of legitimacy, because past decision-making processes form specific legacies affecting even the legitimacy of current decisions and compromises. By exploring the continuum of decision-making processes from the point of view of ‘opening up’ and ‘closing down’, we identify some conditions for processes contributing to legitimate decision ‘closures’, including: 1) the inclusion of all the relevant participants, 2) the problems which the decision should solve are co-defined and mutually agreed on; 3) the timing of the necessary ‘closing down’ of the decision is mutually agreed on; 4) the processes are transparent, and 5) the decision ‘closures’ are not transformed from one scale to another without possibilities for participation. By nurturing these conditions through deliberate process design, capacity to legitimately ‘close down’ decisions in order to resolve complex and value-laden environmental conflicts will increase.