Sustainability is one of the most pressing concerns in our modern society. Nature protection or environmental planning can be understood as one societal answer to some of the ecological challenges of our “developed” society to secure particular nature values and areas. The regulation of nature, however, also affects socio-economic and cultural aspects, and creates contested claims between different types of nature values and interests. Current environmental planning has proved to generate conflict in relation to a wide variety of knowledge, steering, interest, and value facets between national policies, planning institutions and the affected local communities. This thesis explores a wild reindeer habitat protection process in the Southern part of Norway with both local communities and formal planning actors to find openings and closures of the planning horizon for deliberative democratic participation.

The 2-year process of planning generated mixture of openings and closures to deliberative participation. The participatory potential was closed by an instrumentalization of natural scientific knowledge as a provider of truth to the planning process. Iterative dialogue meetings between local and regional authorities succeeded to develop a collaborative planning horizon. However, the participatory arena did not succeed to involve the local community perspectives of nature and its relation to their everyday life. The planning horizon was in this sense not opened to deliberations about nature protection or sustainability in a broader scope than the establishment of wild reindeer habitat protection boundaries.

The thesis argues that nature protection planning, as an answer to societal sustainability challenges, requires broad public participation to deliberate nature-society trajectories beyond boundary setting, risk assessment, and interest negotiation. Participatory nature protection planning is not only a question of procedural legitimacy, but also a matter of deliberating different nature-society rationalities in order to improve the substantial ground for environmental planning trajectories. Meaningful deliberations across institutional and everyday life oriented rationalities can serve to generate emancipatory knowledge, long term engagement, and responsibility to nature-society relations as a concern of the commons.