This paper has a three-fold purpose: to challenge the current
conceptualization of firm-stakeholder engagement, to popularize
‘allemansrätten’, the Scandinavian social innovation tradition for
environmental value creation and environmental governance for ensuring
ecological balance, and to introduce the concept of usufructual rights
and the tutelage of natural resources for promoting human dignity. We
underscore the deficiencies in the current stakeholder paradigm by
pinpointing the specific essential catalysts that move the stakeholder
theory to a new paradigm of a universal stakeownership. This is a quest
to ensure the preservation and sustainability of natural resources and
life support systems within specific institutional orders. We employ an
adaptive research approach based on the Finnish/Nordic ecological case
with a focus on the concept of ‘everyman’s right’: Everyone has the
freedom to enjoy Finland’s/Scandinavia’s forests and lakes but with that
also comes everyman’s responsibility to preserve the country’s nature
for future generations. We argue that uncritically valorizing the
universalized position of the current understanding of stakeholdership,
with its flourish of contradictory and inaccurate characterization of
global sustainability, retroactively aborts our ecological ideals from
the uterus of preferred futures at the expense of humanity as a whole
for the benefit of a few speculators and profiteers. Thus, we are woven
into an ecological and economic tapestry whose present and future the
current generation is accountable for in the era of universal
stakeownership for a crucial evolutionary adaptation. This, however,
cannot come about without fundamentally ‘democratizing’ resource
democracy from the grassroots and questioning the global power structure
that decides on the distributive effects of resources.