Mid Sweden University

The paper offers a new conceptual framework based on property rights and financial compensation in different nature conservation situations in order to provide a globally applicable system for the assessment of participation of public and private stakeholders in envisaged changes within those situations. These situations of change represent a modification from conservation toward non-conservation and vice versa. The framework distinguishes further between governance systems based on command and control as wells as on negotiation. Within these main change situations and governance types, the framework allows the distribution of change situations into 8 main sections. These main sections are further separated into 32 sub-sections by means of different property right and compensations situations among public and private stakeholders. The theoretical utility of this new framework is then demonstrated by testing it by means of a random sample of 74 papers (25%) out of representative 297 papers from the academic literature dealing with property rights. These 74 papers provided practical examples for situations of change in conservation as evidence for most of the 32 sub-section. Several papers provide examples for more than one sub-section. The allocation of papers to these different subsections is described and discussed in detail. This widely possible allocation proofs in general the global applicability and usefulness of the new framework. The framework also proofed to be appropriate for formally (rule of law based) and informally (customary law based) institutionalized situations where rights are given to public and private stakeholders for other practical cases of public participation. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.