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Key Points • Understanding the impacts of SDG 16 on forests and people requires attention to the power dynamics that shape how all 17 SDGs are interpreted and implemented across the Global North and South. • As SDGs were agreed upon by nation states, SDG 16 places a strong emphasis on state power and the rule of law. • Yet inclusive governance requires the involvement of diverse actors, and consideration for customary laws and other non-state forms of rulemaking at global to local scales. • Many national laws governing forests and land use favour political elite, large-scale industry actors and international trade. • The development and strengthening of legal frameworks that support all of the SDGs – including those relevant to human rights, income inequalities, land tenure, gender and environmental protection – requires equal or greater priority than law enforcement. Otherwise, law enforcement will reinforce inequities and unsustainable practices. • SDG 16 provides an opportunity to overcome the stereotypes of the Global North as the referential role model for peace and democracy, by highlighting the role of the North in fostering market inequalities and global conflicts, and drawing attention to barriers to democratic and inclusive participation within the Global North. • How transparency, accountability and justice are conceived and prioritised shapes their impact on forests, as well as the degree to which their achievement either empowers forest-dependent peoples or excludes them from meaningful and informed engagement.

Biodiversity conservation is an important contemporary issue on global, EU and national policy agendas. However, in the face of human economic development, the important question is how to protect, maintain and restore biodiversity, without compromising economic and social dimensions of sustainability. Two sectors that can to a large extent influence biodiversity are forestry and road infrastructure development. Forestry is a sector very important for biodiversity conservation, since a large amount of protected and threatened species resides in forest ecosystems and many natural processes crucial for biodiversity occur in the forest. In addition, forests and woodlands form a network of habitats for many area-demanding species. Due to intensive forest management and fragmentation of forest and woodlands many elements of biodiversity are threatened, including species, habitats and processes. Road infrastructure development is another process that can negatively influence biodiversity. A growing network of transport infrastructure without doubt affects the functionality of the forest habitat networks. Negative effects include traffic mortality due to road collisions and barrier effect for individuals caused by high traffic volume, noise, wide roads and fencing. Cumulative effects of the infrastructure development can also lead to a loss of different elements of biodiversity at the landscape scale. Poland, with a legacy of less intensive forest management and still without a well-developed road infrastructure, is fortunate in terms of biodiversity maintenance. Due to economic underdevelopment of some regions of the country, Poland is rich in natural values including specialized species, functional habitat networks and ecological processes. However, after entering the European Union, Poland has started a process of rapid economic development, mainly with the help of EU funding. Enhancing road infrastructure is presently a key issue of economic development in this country. Dramatic growth in the amount of new roads can have large scale consequences for the biodiversity of the country, and can even influence biodiversity at the European scale. Policies aiming at biodiversity maintenance underline the need for implementing sustainability ideas in the planning and management for biodiversity. Traditionally, economic, environmental and social pillars of sustainability are identified. To be able to balance these three dimensions in the efforts for biodiversity conservation, there is a need to incorporate social dimensions in the nature science research concerning biodiversity. Especially, consideration of local attitudes is necessary in planning for biodiversity conservation. The aim of this thesis is to examine actors' attitudes and underlying values in two situations of conflict related to biodiversity conservation in Poland. One case concerns forest management in a biodiversity hot-spot, Białowieża forest and the other is about a development of a controversial road project of Augustów bypass. The results show that differences in attitudes may have various sources. The knowledge possessed by actors, their values, as well as scale at which they perceived biodiversity issues were identified as the main reasons for different attitudes. It was observed that in general, the actors whose attitudes were more "ecologically oriented" had to a large extent a cognitive view, that is their attitudes were mainly based on cognition (ecological knowledge) while "socially" or "economically oriented" actors' attitudes were more connected to emotions. In addition to differing attitudes, lack of trust was recognized in both cases as a factor escalating the conflict. The results showed also that legal issues are crucial to consider when biodiversity conservation is at stake. The results may have implications for the practical biodiversity conservation, since they show that both learning and legal incentives would be beneficial for the biodiversity conservation in controversial planning cases. This calls for the need for neutral forum for efficient public participation, communication and trust building between the actors and learning about important issues

Wild animals are used for research and management purposes in Sweden and throughout the world. Animals are often subjected to similar procedures and risks of compromised welfare from capture, anesthesia, handling, sampling, marking, and sometimes selective removal. The interpretation of the protection of animals used for scientific purposes in Sweden is based on the EU Directive 2010/63/EU. The purpose of animal use, irrespective if the animal is suffering or not, decides the classification as a research animal, according to Swedish legislation. In Sweden, like in several other European countries, the legislation differs between research and management. Whereas, animal research is generally well-defined and covered in the legislation, wildlife management is not. The protection of wild animals differs depending on the procedure they are subjected to, and how they are classified. In contrast to wildlife management activities, research projects have to implement the 3Rs and must undergo ethical reviews and official animal welfare controls. It is often difficult to define the dividing line between the two categories, e.g., when marking for identification purposes. This gray area creates uncertainty and problems beyond animal welfare, e.g., in Sweden, information that has been collected during management without ethical approval should not be published. The legislation therefore needs to be harmonized. To ensure consistent ethical and welfare assessments for wild animals at the hands of humans, and for the benefit of science and management, we suggest that both research and management procedures are assessed by one single Animal Ethics Committee with expertise in the 3Rs, animal welfare, wildlife population health and One Health. We emphasize the need for increased and improved official animal welfare control, facilitated by compatible legislation and a similar ethical authorization process for all wild animal procedures.

With continued pressure on biodiversity and ever-growing conflicts with human development, qualified systems for scenario modelling, impact assessment and decision support are urgently needed. Such systems must be able to integrate complex models and information from many sources and do so in a flexible and transparent way. To that end, as well as for other complicated and data-intensive biodiversity research purposes, the concept of LifeWatch has emerged. The idea of LifeWatch is to construct e-infrastructure and virtual laboratories by integrating large data sources, computational capacities, and tools for analysis and modelling in an open, serviceoriented architecture. To be efficient and accurate, a continuous inflow of large quantities of data is essential. However, even with new techniques, government-funded monitoring data and research data will not feed the system with up-to-date species information of sufficient scale and resolution. To fill this void, skilled amateur observers (citizen scientists) can contribute to a very valuable extent. After a preparatory phase, a Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) consortium was initiated in 2011. Swedish LifeWatch developed an infrastructure where all components are accessible through open web services. At the SLW Analysis portal, different formats of species and environmental data can be accessed instantly, and integrated, analysed, visualized and downloaded at selected temporal, spatial or taxonomic scales. Swedish LifeWatch currently provides 46 million species observations from eight different databases, all harmonized according to standardized formats and the Dyntaxa taxonomic backbone database. Almost 40 million of these observations were provided by citizens through the online reporting system named the Species Observation System (SOS) or Artportalen. This paper describes this system, as well as the incentives that make it so successful. The citizen science data in the SOS are accessible, together with data from research and monitoring, in the SLW infrastructure, making the latter a powerful instrument for large-scale data extraction, visualization and analysis.

The evaluation of organizational climate is a critical factor in business management, and its importance is even greater in military higher education institutions, due to the high motivation and commitment expected from their members. However, research on this topic in Ecuador is scarce. The present study validates a scale to measure organizational climate in Ecuadorian military higher education institutions. The instrument proposed by Hernández, Garrido & Rico (2016) was applied to an intentional sample of 44 Military Engineering School (ESINGM) members. Its reliability was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient, obtaining values above 0.960, indicating high internal consistency. The dimensions of the organizational climate present in the institution were identified, and the results of the first-level statistical validation were presented. It is concluded that the scale is valid and reliable for measuring the organizational climate in this institution. In addition, this study contributes to the understanding of the organizational climate in military higher education institutions in Ecuador and may have implications for the management and improvement of educational quality in the context of higher education in Ecuador.

The question under investigation in this dissertation is whether the management- and market-oriented reforms of public institutions in Sweden of the 1980s and 1990s have affected municipal politics in the direction of more or less conflict. The analysis takes its point of departure from Arend Lijphart's model of majoritarian versus consensus democracy. Majoritarian democracy refers to a form of democracy in which the central role of electing decision-makers and holding them accountable is emphasized. Majoritarian democracy therefore underlines the importance of conflict in politics. Consensus democracy refers to a form of democracy in which the importance of representing the preferences of political minorities, not only those of the majority, is emphasized. Consensus democracy therefore underlines the concern for consensus between political actors. In this study, four municipalities with different political majorities and reform ambitions within the county of Stockholm were chosen for comparative analysis . The study shows that the reforms in all likelihood have affected the political work in a more majoritarian direction. This applies in particular to the efforts of introducing new forms of management. The political relations have become more conflict-oriented and more coordinated or centralized within each political party and between the parties of a leftist and rightist orientation respectively. The political relations within the municipal committees have also become more conflict oriented, primarily by a more public and pronounced expression of divergent views. These results clearly strengthens the argument in Swedish debate that municipal politics is increasingly becoming more similar to national politics, where it is only the political parties in parliamentary majority that governs public administration. The results of this investigation therefore have implications on the organization of municipal politics in Sweden, as it is currently based on a more consensual form of democracy.

Three tense events involving the US Army and the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache nations in Oklahoma in the decades after the end of the Great Plains Wars seemed destined to end in violence: The Ghost Dance in 1890−91, the death of three Kiowa boys in a blizzard in 1891 and the transfer of Geronimo and around three hundred Chiricahua Apache Indians to Oklahoma in 1895. In all of these events a US Cavalry officer, Hugh Lenox Scott, played a key role as a soldier-diplomat. Through his linguistic skills and inter-cultural competence, Scott, assisted by Iseeo, a Kiowa army scout and close friend of Scott's, managed to prevent the three situations from erupting in violence. These outcomes are in stark contrast to what happened around the same time in the Northern Plains, where violence erupted on several occasions, most conspicuously at Wounded Knee in December 1890, when US troops killed between 150 and 200 Lakota Indians. The purpose of this micro historical study is to highlight how the military, in concrete action, could promote peace and development in their dealings with American Indians and to explore the significance of personal relations, tolerance and trust for the maintenance of peace. These factors were crucial for the more peaceful development on the Southern Plains compared with in the north. In promoting peace, moreover, Scott not only acted as a diplomat in relation to the Indians; he also successfully advised his superior commanders not to send troops into the field in order to uphold order and quell any possible unrest. Such deployment of troops, Scott was convinced, was like putting a keg of gunpowder in front of an open fire and risked sparking uncontrolled and lethal violence between the soldiers and the Indians, to the detriment of the latter, as happened at Wounded Knee. Based on his long service as a soldier-diplomat, Scott later in life developed a general theory about the military as a peacemaking institution. According to Scott, it was politicians and the people who made war and the task of the military was to conquer the peace. His styling of the US soldier as the "harbinger of peace and mercy", however, depended on Scott ignoring the many instances when the US military had failed to maintain peace and order, both in relation to the American Indians and in colonies overseas. ; Förmedlare i imperialistisk expansion: Möten och kontakter i USA:s gränsland (1876−1916)