The use of forests and forest land is increasingly subject to global debate, both within and outside the traditional forest sector. The subject of Forest Policy is concerned with society’s governing of the use of forests and forest land. This includes social scientific based studies of relevant politics and policy at the global, EU and national levels and different political actors like the state, market and civil society.
Moving towards sustainable management of forests requires knowledge and understanding of collective action for governing the use of forests. The Forest Policy Research Group at the Department of Forest Products, SLU Uppsala conducts research on forest governance. We are concerned with describing and explaining changes within the forest policy domain as well as contemporary forest policy history. Our research covers a variety of subjects and is based on social and especially on political science theory.
Objectives of the Group
We contribute theoretically founded empirical results to national and international peers in the field of forest and environmental policy research. Concerning teaching, our objective is to provide students with structured knowledge on forest policy processes, including its actors, interests, rules and discourses.
Research direction
We place our research within the broad conceptual framework of “governance”. The concept of “governance” is nowadays used by academics and practitioners alike to denote a situation of changing societal regulatory arrangements where “government” is no longer the sole rule-making authority. The processes of change generally referred to as ‘globalization’ has also implied transformations of the political space. Such transformations include a partial shift from ‘government’ regulation to ‘multi-actor’ governance, where regulatory authority is nowadays dispersed among public, private and public-private actors. It also includes partial shifts of regulatory competences from ‘inter-governmental’ to local as well as to ‘supra-territorial’ level.
Governing of forests around the world has changed considerably in the last decades. An increasing amount of policy with a bearing on forests is being adopted at the global level. In parallel, many countries have seen decentralization of control over natural resource management. In addition, we have seen the emergence of market-based governing in the form of forest certification as well as the emergence of public-private initiatives aimed at sustainable management of forests. In short, forest governance has become increasingly complex, involving different kinds of actors and different kinds of governing forms which interact in different ways at different spatial levels.
We are researching different aspects of ‘governance’, with a view to what it means to Swedish forest politics and policy. Swedish forest policy-making is still characterized by interrelations between different national interests like the forest industry, forest owners, nature conservationist and the Sami people. However, global policy processes and agreements as well as international market-based regulatory initiatives seem to have become important sites of governance as well. Further, despite the absence of a common formal EU forest policy, the EU increasingly enacts regulations in policy areas that affect the forest sector directly or indirectly, for example concerning environment, energy and transport, and enterprise and industry.
This ‘multilayered’ and ‘multi-actor’ governance situation raises a number of general questions for research like for example: Who sets the political agenda regarding forests these days, and where is it set? Where is the ‘most important’ site of governance? To what extent is global forest policy-making impacting on national forest governance? Being part of the EU, to what extent is ‘Swedish interests’ influencing international forest policy developments? What does current governance paradigms like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘Sustainable Forest Management’, or global discourses on for example climate change, mean for development of forest policy content? Which interests and views become reflected in normative policy content? What does it say about collective ability to deal with conflicting societal objectives regarding forests?
Besides the governance research, we also monitor global trends in forestry practices, forestry as a tool in rural development, forest management and and environmental conservation, and, in collaboration with other colleagues at the department, forest industry.