Private forest owners' sense of landownership : motives, influential factors and landscape context

Andabaka, Marijana (author), Teslak, Krunoslav (author), Ficko, Andrej (author)

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.

• Language: English
• Keywords: psychological ownership, place attachment, landowners, relational values, structural equation modeling, spatial autocorrelation
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: BF - Biotechnical Faculty
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2021
• Number of pages: 12 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 215, art. 104200
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-132252
• UDC: 630*92
• ISSN on article: 0169-2046
• DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104200
• COBISS.SI-ID: 81418243
• Publication date in RUL: 19.10.2021

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Landscape and urban planning
• Shortened title: Landsc. urban plan.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 0169-2046
• COBISS.SI-ID: 5174023

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: psihološko lastništvo, navezanost na prostor, lastništvo zemljišč, relacijske vrednosti, modeliranje strukturnih enačb, prostorska avtokorelacija

Projects

• Funder: HRZZ - Croatian Science Foundation
• Project number: IP-2018-01-8820

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P4-0059
• Name: Gozd, gozdarstvo in obnovljivi gozdni viri