Copyright © 2013 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.
Hiedanpää, J. 2013. Institutional misfits: law and habits in Finnish wolf policy. Ecology and Society 18(1):
24. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05302-180124
Research, part of a Special Feature on Nudging Evolution? Critical Exploration of the Potential and Limitations of the
Concept of Institutional Fit for the Study and Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems
Institutional Misfits: Law and Habits in Finnish Wolf Policy
Juha Hiedanpää 1
ABSTRACT. Finland has struggled with formulating and implementing policies regarding the national grey wolf (Canis lupus)
population. It seems that after major institutional adjustments undertaken to improve wolf protection, the wolf population has,
in fact, decreased. This calls for an explanation. My approach to the question of institutional fit builds upon classical institutional
economics and pragmatism. I will apply Charles S. Peirce’s conception of habits and his theory of categories and the idea of
normative sciences. The case study from southwestern Finland shows that if the institutional designers would address the habits
of feeling, mind, and action, including their own, that frame and constitute the problematic situation and potential solutions, the
critical conditions of institutional fit would be more tangible and easier to identify and handle. As long as policy adjustments
are reactive and compulsive and not built upon a reasonable engagement of whole epistemic community in habit-breaking and
habit-taking, policies will most likely fail.
Key Words: grey wolf (Canis lupus); habits; institutional fit; institutions; policy; pragmatism
INTRODUCTION
Finland has struggled with formulating and implementing
policies regarding the national wolf population. The presence
of the grey wolf (Canis lupus) is a rather peculiar
environmental problem because its hundred-year-long near
extinction means that it seems like a foreign invader but is
actually native to the area. Finland’s accession to the European
Union (EU) in 1995 started a new era of large carnivore policy.
The wolf became strictly protected by the European Union’s
Habitats Directive. In addition, after major institutional
adjustments undertaken to improve wolf protection, the wolf
population has, in fact, decreased (Figure 1). This calls for an
explanation.
Fig. 1. The wolf population in Finland (Kojola et al. 2011).
Figure 1 shows that the pre-EU wolf policy was unable to
strengthen the viability of the wolf population. The population
size dipped in the late 1990s; consequently, the European
Commission initiated Infringement Proceedings (2001) to
compel Finland to improve large carnivore protection. As part
of the wildlife administration’s reaction to the infringement
procedure, an unprecedented effort to date to involve the
public in wolf policy making in Finland took place. Finland
prepared the Wolf Management Plan (Management 2005)
based on various meetings and public hearings organized
across Finland (Bisi and Kurki 2008). The wolf population
increased during this period. 
The Commission called the case to the European Court of
Justice (ECJ) in 2005. The Commission claimed that (1) the
conservation status of the wolf in Finland was not favorable;
(2) Finland had not honored the principle of strict protection;
and (3) Finland had not adequately explored feasible
alternatives to wolf predation to reduce livestock losses.
Following an investigation into these allegations, the Court
rendered its judgment in June 2007. Finland was found to be
at fault in one of the charges (2) but not the other two (1, 3).
The Court ordered the Finnish government to rectify its failure
to offer strict protection to wolves. In the two other respects,
the Finnish wolf policy was in line with the Habitats Directive
(European Court of Justice 2007, Hiedanpää and Bromley
2011).  
In 2008, the estimated wolf population in Finland was
approximately 200 (compared to 130-140 in 1995). The
population spread to and increased in western Finland.
However, the population has declined since 2008. Currently,
the estimated winter population is approximately 120-135
wolves (winter 2013 estimate). The apparent decline of wolves
1Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute
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Fig. 2. The Pyhäjärvi area
across Finland has only one plausible explanation: illegal
killing of the wolves. According to the Finnish Game and
Fisheries Research Institute (RKTL), there were no biological
reasons for their disappearance; the roe deer and moose
populations were sufficiently dense and there were no signs
of lethal diseases (Kojola et al. 2011). 
I will explain why it is useful to discuss institutional misfit in
the context of Finnish wolf policy. The spatial case is that of
the Pyhäjärvi area, where the first severe wolf predation of
livestock in a hundred years happened in August 2008. Wolves
killed or lethally injured 65 sheep in Köyliö on four pastures
during July and August. Two communities in particular,
Köyliö and Pöytyä, were taken by surprise since both of them
have wolf packs of their own, the Köyliö pack in Köyliö and
the Yläne pack in Pöytyä (see Figure 2). These relatively small
communities (3,500 and 8,500 residents, respectively) are
located within 50 km of three major southern Finnish cities:
Tampere, Turku, and Pori. It is a flat area with a relatively
broad state-owned wilderness area, Vaskijärvi Strict Nature
Reserve (15 km2) and Kurjenrahka National Park, along with
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several large private estates and a multitude of small farms
(approximately 70 percent of forest in southwestern Finland
is privately owned, and the average size of forest property is
approximately 30 hectares).  
While drawing on the concept of fit developed by Young
(2002, 2008), I will offer a variation on his approach. First, in
my treatment, the questions concerning institutional fit and
interplay are intertwined: the pre-existing institutional
arrangements and local people are part of both the problem
and the solution (see Vatn and Vedeld 2012). Second, the strict
separation between institutions (as potential solutions) and
ecosystems (as potential problems) cannot be made (see
Bromley 2012). I will build on a pragmatist view and suggest
that institutional fit concerns habits and how they interlock.
In particular, fit is about habit-breaking and habit-taking. I
follow John Dewey and especially Charles Sanders Peirce in
claiming that a richer definition of institutional fit than
Young’s (2002, 2008) is available. My main argument is that
the policies that focus only on habit-breaking and ignore habit-
taking will most likely fail. I will argue that if the institutional
designers would address and acknowledge the habits of
feeling, action, and mind, including their own, that frame and
constitute the problematic situation and potential solutions,
the matter of institutional fit would become easier to identify
and handle.
THEORETICAL NAVIGATION
What are institutions?
According to the most customary definition, institutions are
formal or informal rules. Institutions may then be articulated
rules enforced with sanctions, incentives, unarticulated
traditions, customs, and moral norms. This line of reasoning
follows the new institutionalism of, for instance, Douglass C.
North (2005) and Oliver Williamson (1996) (on old and new
institutionalism, see Rutherford 1994). This definition takes
formal and informal institutions as the outer constraints of
individual action. Institutions direct and stabilize individual
action by compelling certain general goals and offer more
practical means (incentives and sanctions) of actualizing these
goals. Institutions constitute societal scaffolding that shapes
human interaction (North 2005). The challenge in institutional
design and policy implementation is whether actors find these
new setups sufficiently compelling and acceptable. Young
(2008:21) makes the following argument: “successful
governance systems must be based on a recognition of the
character of the problems at hand and feature the introduction
of behavioral mechanisms crafted to address these problems.” 
Another conception of institutions is based on the classical old
institutionalism of John R. Commons and Thorstein Veblen,
both of whom followed pragmatism, especially that of John
Dewey and Charles S. Peirce.[1] According to this view,
institutions are not rules that are followed per se but ordered
collective actions that expand, restrain, or liberate individual
action (Commons 1990). This classical view resembles not
only Bourdieuan sociology but also the social–ecological
understanding of the structures and functionings of coevolving
human–environment transactions (Emirbayer and Goldberg
2005, Hiedanpää et al. 2012, Norberg et al. 2008).  
There are two schools of classical institutionalism differing
on whether order is volitionally created or emerges
spontaneously. Economists such as Bromley (2006, 2008) and
Vatn (2005) and political scientists such as Pierson (2006)
understand institutions as volitional collective action,
manifested in policies and the way that they shape and create
reasons for individual action. Hodgson (1993, 2004, 2007),
on the other hand, considers habit to be the unit of selection
in institutional change. Hodgson holds that institutions are
emergent properties of interacting habits and that these
contingent institutional patterns cause a downward pressure
on individual actions and behavior. Generally, this line of
reasoning also applies to the institutional and evolutionary
economists of the post-Darwinian tradition (Dopfer 2007,
Aldrich et al. 2008). It tends to disregard the significance of
purpose and final causation.
A Peircean extension
My purpose is to stretch these theoretical orientations and
focus on the analytical gap I propose. The theories make an
analytic bifurcation which, in consequence, creates a black
box that blurs the essential matter of institutional fit and
interplay. The existence of this black box is due to their
ontological and epistemological commitment to either formal
or informal, volitional or spontaneous, organized or
unorganized qualities when trying to understand the birth and
entrenchment of institutional designs.  
I will follow the same broad pragmatist approach taken by the
aforementioned classical institutionalists (e.g., Hodgson 2010,
Bromley 2012), but I am also sympathetic to the new
institutionalist idea that institutions constitute an outer
environmental scaffolding for human action and interaction,
i.e., that human action and interaction are mediated by
“environmental” structures and features such as ecosystems,
physical infrastructures, norms, and rules (Clark 1997). I will
make my case clearer by exploring the Peircean conception
of habits, categories, and normative sciences more thoroughly.
My purpose is to provide a nondualistic conception of
institutions and apply it in the analysis of institutional fit.
Habits
According to Peirce (CP 6.101), “life has a tendency to take
habits.”[2] Regularity, continuum, order, stability, and
reasonableness are all manifestations of this general tendency
of life. Although all habits function to fulfill a purpose of some
kind, they are not fully volitional. Peirce warned us not to
identify purpose with a conscious goal. To him, “a purpose is
merely that form of final cause which is most familiar to our
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experience” (CP 1.211). Purposes, i.e., activities undertaken
for something’s sake, are nothing but operative desires, the
object of which is never concrete but always general. Notice
that purposes, final causes, and habits point at the potential
future (Hulswit 2002). For Peirce, final causes or purposes are
basically habits that habitually direct processes toward an end
state. 
For Peirce, there is a specific feature in this end-directedness:
 
 Thus we see how these principles not only lead to
the establishment of habits, but to habits directed to
definite ends, namely the removal of sources of
irritation. Now it is precisely action according to
final causes which distinguishes mental from
mechanical action; and the general formula of all
our desires may be taken as this: to remove a
stimulus. Every man is busily working to bring to an
end that state of things which now excites him to
work.(CP 1.392) 
The irritation (the feeling of being disturbed) motivates one
to resolve the situation by adjusting action tendency, belief,
and habit. The change of habit is not an easy task because it
does not take only motivation and activities but involves the
broader environment in which actions take place. John Dewey
brings customs into the analysis of habits. Dewey (1988:43)
has defined the interrelation of habit and custom eloquently:
“but to a larger extent customs persist because individuals
form their personal habits under conditions set by prior
customs.” Dewey (1988:38) continues: “Habits incorporate
an environment within themselves. They are adjustments of 
the environment, not merely to it” [emphasis in the original].
 
Indeed, many of the institutional adjustments fail because of
a poor fit between their habits, their customary environment,
and their newly launched purposes. In essence, institutional
and social change requires both habit-breaking and habit-
taking. Institutional fit is a matter of embodied and
incorporated environmental interactions. In identifying this
kind of phenomenon, Hukkinen (2012), describes it as “fit in
the body.”
Categories
Peirce provides theoretical and analytical tools to understand
what habit-breaking and habit-taking are, and also to explain
how these phenomena occur. He defines three categories to
organize descriptions of the world, which will be used here to
elaborate a richer conceptualization of the relationship
between fit: firstness, secondness, and thirdness (Volume 5 of
Collected Papers of Pierce in Pierce 1934; Potter 1967).  
Firstness is a qualitative aspect of every phenomenon. We
have an immediate acquaintance with firstness; it is an
unanalyzed, instantaneous, immediate feeling of the sign.
“Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is,
positively and without reference to anything else” (CP 8.328).
As Peirce articulated further, “[o]ut of the womb of
indeterminacy we must say that there would have come
something, by the principle of firstness, which we may call a
flash” (CP 1.412). Firstness is not an actual entity but exists
only in the interpreter’s imagination, being hypothetical and
possible (Bernstein 2010, Corlée 2009).  
Secondness is an experience either of effort or resistance.
According to Peirce (CP 8.330),  
[t]he type of an idea of Secondness is the experience
of effort, prescinded from the idea of a purpose....
The existence of the word effort is sufficient proof
that people think they have such an idea; and that
is enough. The experience of effort cannot exist
without the experience of resistance. Effort is only
effort by the virtue of its being opposed; and no third
element enters. Note that I speak of the experience,
not of the feeling, of effort. 
For Peirce, will is always set against something, reacting in
the realms of relations, disturbances, and struggles.  
Thirdness involves a medium or a connecting link between
two things. When things or words serve a function of any kind,
when the act is done for the sake of something, thirdness
emerges. According to Peirce, “[t]he third is that which is what
it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it
brings into relation to each other” (CP 1.356). “A Third is
something which brings a First into relation to a Second”
[emphasis in the original] (CP 8.331) (Misak 2004).  
Now we are able use Peirce’s theories to understand living
systems’ tendency to break and take habits. Habits direct
processes to an end state. Chance and possibility work toward
diversity of these processes and end states. Reaction and
struggle adjust habits in the face of disturbances and the
admired end states. Peirce’s theory of categories provides a
perspective through which to study the social-ecological
conditions and consequences of this general tendency to break
and take habits. For our purposes, habit is thirdness, effort is
secondness, and feeling is firstness. Categories are capable of
combinations. Effort is an essential constituent of habit, and
feeling is an essential constituent in effort and habit. In other
words, emotions are constituents in (re)action, and emotions
and (re)actions are constituents in habit (Potter 1967).
Institutional fit is a dynamic consequence of irritation and
doubt, overcoming resistance to serve a purpose.
Normative sciences
Peirce describes the task of what he calls normative sciences
as differentiating “what ought to be from what ought not to
be” (CP 1.186). Normative sciences can also be characterized
as an analysis of “the conditions of the attainment of something
of which purpose is an essential ingredient” (CP 1.575).
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Bergman (2009:56) clarifies the task: “... it seems reasonable
to conceive the normativity... in terms of criticism of habits,
where the categories manifest themselves on the level of the
objects criticized rather than as a determinant of the sciences
as such. In other words, all of the normative sciences are
concerned with the criticism of conduct, albeit of different
kinds.” 
I am the critic here. I explore the institutional conditions such
that the criticism of various habits becomes possible. The
Peircean normative sciences require the adoption of the
ethnographic strategy. Commons (1990, see also Ramstad
1990) was well aware of this and suggested that the researcher
must put him/herself in the position of the research subject
and feel what the people likely felt as they were reasoning and
doing. The key is to understand why and how certain actions
were taken. In other words, why and how a particular action
soothes the feeling, extinguishes the stimulus of irritation, and
fulfills a purpose. The question is not about attitudes. It is about
what actions were taken and what reasons were given for those
actions. The critic must become involved in the research
subject. The critic must be both an observer and a participant.
The first-, second- and third-person perspectives are
intertwined. The first-person perspective refers to a feeling
agent, the second-person perspective to a participant in action,
and the third-person perspective to the overview of the
relations between the first and the second (Bohman 2001,
Cooke 2006).  
The primary data set is derived from interviews with the local
people of southwestern Finland and the officials of the national
and regional wildlife administrations. The fieldwork extends
to the participant observations of everyday life in the areas
that have experienced the effects of wolf presence. The
interviews ranged from expansive thematic interviews (23)
lasting several hours to brief mini-interviews (8) with the
people spontaneously met during the fieldwork (on interviews,
see Kvale 1996). Interviews were conducted between the
period of 2009 and 2011. The aim of these interviews was to
develop an empirical image of how the presence of the wolf
affects the habits of rural communities and the administration
and to enable the analysis of institutional fit and misfit (on
location, see Figure 2).
THE PRESENCE OF THE WOLF IN
SOUTHWESTERN FINLAND
Habits of feeling / firstness
Let me first explore the feelings aroused by a sudden
appearance of the wolf. Indeed, the sudden appearance of the
wolf in human settlements took communities by surprise in
the Pyhäjärvi area in 2008. The predation of some 65 sheep
was a shock. The event recalled the observations of the wolf,
tracks and dead corpses of roe deer and other prey that had
been nearly continuous throughout the year. Before that time,
until 2008, the encounters had been rare and idiosyncratic. The
presence of the wolf became an “excitation.” On one hand, it
was an aesthetic excitement, a pleasure of feeling the intensity
and quality of the surrounding environment. On the other hand,
it was a feeling of potential loss, threat, danger, and insecurity.
In general, these feelings and expectations were mixed, and
people felt concern both about and for the wolf. 
The wolf intervened in the various habituated spaces. Its
presence intensified the feeling that the wolf belongs in the
wilderness, where its activities are irrelevant to people, and
not near human settlements containing families and domestic
animals. This boundary between wolves and humans and their
respective territories, what one might call an “ontological
agreement,” was transgressed when indications of the wolf’s
presence began to appear within the livelihood spaces of
humans. Of course, its territory, even deep in the wilderness
and forest, contains human activity, hunting grounds, for
example. It is this transgression into the habituated spaces that
characterizes the quality of feeling provoked by the wolf’s
presence. The wolf belongs to the wilderness and certainly
does not belong to settled human spaces. 
The reappearance of the wolf activated agrarian memories.
The old stories about wolves that had killed human infants
were told and retold, especially by people living their rural
agrarian lives on acknowledged wolf territory. These cultural
memories revitalized themselves even though customs and
rural daily practices are very different now. This pattern
indicates that the agrarian customs (cultures) and the habits of
feeling they sustain still serve particular, if not obvious,
purposes. The agrarian customs and habits sustain these
stories. In a similar vein, the physical structures known as
“wolf holes”, which refer to camouflaged holes measuring
three meters wide and three meters deep for capturing wolves
that come too close to the village, began to have a purpose
again: protecting people and domestic animals against the
wolf. The village of Tuiskula in Köyliö has displayed its four
wolf holes to the public and media.  
Habits are generalities, potential repertoires of acting and
believing that point to the end that is achieved and admired.
In general, the presence of wolves is felt as a limiting factor
to the further development of individual and collective
experiences in the Pyhäjärvi area. The wolf is an icon of the
wilderness, the possibility of threat. In agrarian settings, signs
of wolves communicate the possible harm and the loss of well-
being. In general, the presence of wolves seems to disturb and
excite strong feelings in support of the customary order.
Reactions / secondness
People act to rid themselves of irritation and doubt. In the
Pyhäjärvi area, people and communities had their particular
ways and reasons to react.  
Human safety, especially that of children, was the first point
when discussing the wolf. After the first attacks of 2008 in
Köyliö, many people and communities began to quickly adjust
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their daily activities in various ways. Some decided not to walk
as often in the forests. As the school year was about to begin,
the community councils decided to arrange taxi rides to
schools. One of the pastures in which a predation happened
was situated close to summer houses. The residents were
concerned about the neighboring sheep pastures because sheep
attract wolves; a previous environmental amenity turned to an
environmental nuisance. What is important to note, however,
is that the wolf did not incite anger or hatred in this particular
regard, but worry.  
The security of livelihoods is another issue that arose. Farm-
level precautions rose to a new level. Sheep and goats were
kept inside, and dogs were kept on a leash. The sheep farmers
avoided the dangerous grazing fields and brought the sheep,
goats, and cattle closer to their homes. Later that autumn, most
of the farmers who had suffered losses or the threat of losses
erected electric fences on certain pastures. In 2008, fencing
materials could be ordered free of charge from the Regional
Wildlife Agency (called Game Management District, GMD
until March 2011), but the labor costs of fencing were not
compensated by the government. Some of the sheep farmers
disputed this policy. Moreover, due to fiscal problems, the
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry could not deliver enough
fencing materials to the sheep farmers. In general, farmers
were concerned for their business and livelihoods. Some were
annoyed and frustrated because the governmental
compensation was paid after nearly a year, a considerable lapse
of time. This lag placed an additional economic burden on
sheep farmers. They, along with farmers in general, found the
situation disturbing.  
The resistance against the instituted processes of knowledge
production was a third issue. Local communities disputed the
official numbers of wolves. Rumors spread that the Pyhäjärvi
area, especially around Pöytyä, was surrounded by more than
twenty wolves. Local hunters organized wolf censuses in
Pöytyä in late 2008 and in early 2009, counting 25 and 23
wolves, respectively. The official estimates provided by the
Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute (RKTL)
indicated that Pöytyä had one territory, i.e., one wolf pack.
Hunters and their organization (Finnish Hunter’s Association)
did not have confidence in the estimates provided by RKTL
and, similarly, researchers of RKTL did not consider the
hunters’ counting methods to be scientifically robust. Hunters
were frustrated and angry because their concern and efforts
were not taken seriously.  
Fourth, local people reacted to the legal and administrative
rules of society. The increasing presence of the wolf brought
the legal constraints to the fore. Namely, the hunters found it
hard to understand why it was not possible to kill the wolves
despite the fact that their presence caused concerns and
exceeded a critical threshold in 2008. The rules concerning
the derogation from protecting the wolf population are strict
for local hunters. Another example is even more illuminating.
In one of the pastures, the sheep kept the valuable cultural
landscape open, for which the sheep farmer received a specific
agro-environmental subsidy. After the wolf attack, the
inspector from the regional Ely-center (Centre for Economic
Development, Transport and the Environment) pointed out
that the pastures were undergrazed, and the sheep farmer
received a several-hundred Euro penalty. The cause of the
undergrazing, i.e., that the wolf killed the sheep, did not matter.
Consequently, frustration and anger spread in communities.
Their interests in a secure agriculture and safe livelihoods did
not carry the same weight as the bureaucratic commitment to
securing wolf numbers.
Continuities / thirdness
Habit relates feelings and efforts to each other. As illustrated,
reactions were instantiated by the presence of the wolf. The
wolf disturbed habituated spaces and customary livelihoods
in the Pyhäjärvi area. Interestingly, however, the reactions
were triggered by the combinations of institutional
arrangements, administrative circumstances, and the wolf.
Frustration and anger intensified the reactions. 
Consequently, by June 2009, only a few wolf observations
were made in the Pyhäjärvi area, whereas in the previous year,
the observations were made continuously. There were no wolf
attacks on sheep or on other domestic animals. The wolves
were gone. There were no signs of the Köyliö pack that had
depredated 65 sheep, and the numbers in the Pöytyä pack were
greatly reduced. According to the RKTL, there were no evident
ecological reasons behind the disappearance: the prey
populations, roe deer and moose, were sufficiently dense, and
there were no signs of lethal diseases. The only plausible
explanation is that the number of the wolves had been reduced
by illegal killing.  
It seems that the communities of the Pyhäjärvi area solved
their “wolf problem.” The communities exercised social
sustainability. Social sustainability of this kind is not the same
breed that the EU or the Finnish national authorities wish to
promote. The detailed reasons behind these local adaptive acts
are still unknown, but the evidence points to respect and
sympathy toward fellow humans, concern for the rights of the
people over the rights of the wolf, and anger toward the
authoritative agencies. The purpose of the illegal killing of the
wolves was to safeguard the Pyhäjärvi communities from the
potential impact of the wolves’ presence and to maintain local
customary order. All community members did not commit
themselves to the formal wolf policy. The habits of feeling
and the reactions in the face of the wolf policy indicated this.
The negatively felt possibilities and negative intense emotions
in reactions did not engender communities and their members
to the policy. The purpose of the policy remained distant. This
comes toward explaining why communities were engaged in
exercising one kind of continuum over the other. This helps
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to explain why communities exercised one set of practices
rather than another. It also illustrates the nature of institutional
“misfit”. The policy did not lead to an admired future.
THE HARDSHIP OF MAKING INSTITUTIONS FIT
The viability of the wolf population has not improved in
southwestern Finland. Consequently, in 2009, the European
Commission once again called for an informal discussion (the
Package Meeting) on wildlife-related issues with Finnish
authorities. The Commission claimed that Finland continued
to have problems in the implementation and enforcement of
the Habitats Directive. The wildlife administration admitted
the problems and expressed its continued commitment to
tighten the institutional setup concerning large carnivore
protection.
Weeding out the bad habits
The Finnish government and the wildlife administration tend
to understand institutions as the outer constraints of human
action, which is a new institutionalist inclination (Rutherford
1994, Williamson 1996). This tendency became apparent in
the fall of 2010 when the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
enforced a legal adjustment that increased the fine for killing
large carnivores. The purpose of the adjustment was to enrich
the institutional scaffold with a disincentive to hunt illegally.
Also, a new penal category, a serious hunting crime, was
included in the criminal law. It came into force in April 2011.
According to the law, the telemonitoring of suspects by the
police is allowed, and a conviction leads to a prison term of
four months to four years. These institutional designs build on
the idea that when it comes to enforcement mechanisms, the
threat of punishment is the most effective. It is expected that
these newly launched institutional constraints will discourage
illegal killing; the purpose is to deter the bad habits of some
rural agents.  
These activities may not necessarily improve the institutional
fit. Namely, the weeding out of bad habits is a reactive
administrative activity. We should remember that the entire
emotional regime of the Finnish wolf policy is reactive. This
is undoubtedly indicated by the continued struggle between
the government of Finland and the Commission, the wolf
enthusiasts, and the hunters, and the local hunters and wildlife
science of RKTL. One Finnish wolf scientist has gone so far
as to claim that the Finnish wolf conflict is insoluble, that is,
there is no way that people can address the issues with the wolf
or with each other when it comes to the impacts of the wolf
(Bisi 2010). Indeed, according the Peircean interpretation, the
problems are insoluble exactly as long as the game is played
on the plateau of reactions and struggle and as long as the
underlying habits of feeling and customary environments are
not addressed. Until then, the solutions will build upon “the
compulsion of law,” i.e., reactive legislative adjustments that
rely on the external constraints of human action and
interaction.
The currency of concern
The government has adjusted not only the external constraints
of human–wolf interactions but also the formal scaffolding of
wildlife policy and management. The new Act on Wildlife
Administration came into effect in March 2011. Regional
Wildlife Agencies (15 in total) and Regional Wildlife Councils
were established, and the previous regional Game
Management Districts (GMD) (15 in total) and their board of
directors were dismantled. The purpose of the institutional
redesign was to establish a clearer distinction between the
official wildlife management and interest politics. The
Regional Wildlife Councils substitute for the previous board
of directors of the GMD. The Councils comprise a maximum
of 10 members: six represent the hunters and four represent
other interests, such as regional land use planning, forest
owners, and traffic. The councils are discursive bodies with
the task of directing regional wildlife policy. The board of
directors of GMD had real decision making powers, most
noticeably concerning the derogation from the strict protection
of the wolf. Such decisions are now made by the Finnish
Wildlife Agency. The members of the GMD board of directors
were local landowners and hunters. There are indications that
the shift of power from the regional level to the Finnish
Wildlife Agency may increase the felt impotency of rural
communities, including around the Pyhäjärvi area.  
By focusing primarily on the illegal killing of the wolves and
by dismantling the actual power at the regional level, the
government has implicitly and indirectly signaled that the local
communities are, to an extent, responsible for the wolves’ fate.
Neither the government nor the wildlife administration has
actively taken wolf-related community needs and hopes into
consideration. In other words, the administration has a habit
of ignoring the reasons behind the communities’ reactions or
negative feelings. This habit has become apparent in how
reluctant the administration has been to alleviate the economic
and emotional burdens engendered by the wolves’ presence.
The regulatory apparatus that the government has erected has
left the sources of frustration and anger intact. Its
noninterventionist policy has an accidental tendency to
increase the populace’s feelings of insecurity, helplessness,
and anger. The government has not actively designed
institutions for positive order and growth. The government
itself exercises discipline and control, which is, again, a
reactive characteristic of governance.
Making rules, not love
The government’s focus has been habit-breaking. The
government has done little in terms of habit-taking among
rural communities that would help them to adapt to the wolves’
presence. The government has not designed institutions to
enshrine habits of moral and intellectual growth. The
government’s normative effort, which involves the ongoing
criticism of local habits, is not expansive but constraining. It
considers neither the underlying emotional regime nor the
Ecology and Society 18(1): 24
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critical conditions of habit formation. The administration has,
of course, admitted that fear is real and that it has material
manifestations and practical implications. However,
community members have continued to exercise their private
negative freedoms and have spontaneously, without active
governmental assistance, adjusted their community-based
customs and habits in particular ways. The viability of the wolf
population has not been on their list of priorities.  
Habits change when environment–human interactions change.
It is not only a matter of fixing outer constraints. The
government’s participation in the process of habit-taking
could facilitate a move towards what Peirce called concrete
reasonableness (Ward 2001). This term means that the
collaboration and collateral learning potentially facilitate a
gradual shift in what is admired in given environmental
settings and how the agents react to the next disturbance. The
shared experiences lead to gradual changes concerning what
people consider an attainable end. Concrete reasonableness is
characterized by epistemic commitment to collaborate as a
community to find, redescribe, and create admired ends,
appropriate actions, and warranted epistemic practices (Ward
2001, Talisse 2010). Concrete reasonableness is a process of
adjusted habit-taking. Institutional fit is not a matter of
correctly establishing the external constraints or constructing
the negative apparatuses. Institutional fit is about creating,
designing, and erecting the positive, enabling environmental
apparatuses. In the Pyhäjärvi area, the interested individuals
and groups have already taken initiatives for more
collaboration. However, as long as the government, the
wildlife administration, or the research institute RKTL are not
actively taking part in these efforts, wolf policy is hardly
becoming any fitter or more reasonable. It takes shared
feelings and visions about the admired to grow habits. This
indeed will continue to challenge Finnish wolf policy.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Reflecting on the Pyhäjärvi area, are the initiated policy
measures the most appropriate and the most effective in
breaking and taking new habits that allow communities to
coexist with the wolves? Do the recent policy measures resolve
the concerns, reestablish feelings of security, or help
community members to live with the presence of the wolf?
No, they probably do not. Apparently, these communities,
which have been disturbed by the wolf and the
unresponsiveness of the wildlife administration, continue to
admire certain purposes and encourage certain codes of
conduct that are not the most honorable or law-abiding, but
which are expected to safeguard the continuity of rural life.
The government may initiate changes and may provide
enabling institutions and facilitate the micro-mechanism of
adaptation. As this classical institutionalist analysis has
shown, as long as those instruments are reactive and
compulsive and not collaborative engagement of whole
epistemic community in habit-taking, they will the most likely
fail (on epistemic communities, see Haas 1992). In
collaboration, customs, habits, and the ensuing emotional
regimes may slowly begin to change. Institutions, the various
forms of ordered collective actions, may begin to better fit
together in the habituated social–ecological space in which
the people, communities, and the wolf live. It will not be an
exact fit because no such thing exists. However, if the
government ensures that the wildlife policy enables concrete
collaboration and collateral learning, fit may become doable,
possible and reasonable, for the time being.
Responses to this article can be read online at: 
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/responses.
php/5302
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank Daniel Bromley, Janne Hukkinen, Sauli
Härkönen, Jani Pellikka, and the Special Feature editor Kate
Farrell for the valuable comments on the earlier version of
the manuscript. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the
Academy of Finland (253750).
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[1]
 John R. Commons (1862-1945) is considered one of the
founding fathers, together with Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
and Wesley Mitchell (1874-1948), of institutional economics.
Their debt to pragmatism is well known (Mirowski
1988:106-133; Ramstad 1990; Hodgson 2004). In his magnum
opus, Commons devotes an extensive section to Peirce. To
Commons, Peirce’s philosophy of science and the role of
habits in social and economic life are obvious (see Commons
1990, 102, 140-157.) Already, Bromley (2006), Hodgson
(1993; 2004), and Ramstad (1990) have worked on combining
classical institutionalism with Peirce’s philosophy of science;
Norton (1996; 2005) has worked to combine environmental
pragmatism with Peirce’s philosophy of science; and
Hiedanpää and Bromley (2012) have worked on institutional
change from the viewpoint of Peirce’s theory of signs.
[2]
 Peirce’s Collective Papers are conventionally cited by
volume and paragraph number.