Evaluation of policy instruments for supporting greenhouse gas mitigation efforts in agricultural and urban land use

•Most effective measures are associated to the reduction of deforestation.•Most effective policy instrument would be a fee for deforestation.•Experts emphasized efficiency and legitimacy of policy instruments.•More attention should be paid to the vertical coherence of policy instruments. The land use sector offers government the means to contribute to the achievement of climate change mitigation targets. The aim of this study was to identify the most important policy instruments for supporting climate change mitigation efforts in the land-use sector in Finland and increase understanding on the performance of these instruments. This was done by analysing experts’ views on the most effective policy instruments related to climate change mitigation in agricultural and urban land use in Finland and identifying the criteria that experts use when evaluating these instruments. The experts’ views were obtained by interviews, a workshop and a survey, and the results were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed. The experts emphasized the effectiveness of economic policy instruments in the promotion of practical measures for climate change mitigation. According to the experts, the most effective policy instrument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the land use sector would be a fee for deforestation. However, based on the analyses using four other evaluation criteria (efficiency, legality, democracy, legitimacy), economic policy instruments imply greater challenges than regulatory or informational policy instruments. Furthermore, based on the results, the coherence of economic policy instruments, i.e. to what extent they have synergies in achieving different policy objectives, needs to be carefully examined in the planning phase. In particular, more attention should be paid to the analysis of relationship across different scales of governance when designing new policy instruments for climate change mitigation.