Scholarship in international law aims at addressing global forest governance comprehensively. This article reviews the recent contribution Global Forest Governance - Legal Concepts and Policy Trends by Rowena Maguire and puts it into the perspective of recent political and policy science research on global forests. While finding Maguire's volume being a very timely and valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary discussions on international forest governance, we identify some weaknesses which are mostly rooted in methodological critique and a lack of a systematic framework for analysis.
The EU Renewable Energy Strategy (RES) Directive requires that each member state obtain 20% of its energy supply from renewable sources by 2020. If fully implemented, this implies major changes in institutions, infrastructure, land use, and natural resource flows. This study applies a political geography perspective to explore the transition to renewable energy use in the heating and cooling segment of the Swedish energy system, 1980–2010. The Nordic welfare model, which developed mainly after the Second World War, required relatively uniform, standardized local and regional authorities functioning as implementation agents for national politics. Since 1980, the welfare orientation has gradually been complemented by competition politics promoting technological change, innovation, and entrepreneurship. This combination of welfare state organization and competition politics provided the dynamics necessary for energy transition, which occurred in a semi-public sphere of actors at various geographical scales. However, our analysis, suggest that this was partly an unintended policy outcome, since it was based on a welfare model with no significant energy aims. Our case study suggests that state organization plays a significant role, and that the EU RES Directive implementation will be uneven across Europe, reflecting various welfare models with different institutional pre-requisites for energy transition.
This article introduces an innovative method to describe data with sounds in political science. The method, known in ecology, physics, and musicology as "sonification," operates by linking sound signals to quantifiable observations. We us it to compose a choir of legitimacy crises in global governance from 1994 to 2014, and to negotiate a familiar divide in research on how legitimacy should be measured. Scholars predominantly prefer one of two approaches to measure legitimacy quantitatively, either looking at political trust or public contestation of political institutions. We illustrate the usefulness of sonification to subsume both positions in this divide. More generally, we argue that sonification can enhance public communication of scientific results and extract meanings from observations that go unnoticed in visual and verbal representations, in particular with relevance to describing time series data on anything from the spread of pandemics to violent conflicts and economic inequalities.
Vem har rätt till naturen, skogen och marken? Hur har äganderätt sett ut i Sverige historiskt, och vad grundar sig vår syn på äganderätt på? Den tidigmoderna äganderätten var inte lika strikt som den moderna – ett exempel på ett självorganiserat utnyttjande av allmänningar var fäbodväsendet. Men dessa allmänningar har minskat i takt med den biologiska mångfalden i jordbruksbygderna.
Building the adaptive capacity of interlinked social and ecological systems is assumed to improve implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) policies. One mechanism is collaborative learning by continuous evaluation, communication, and transdisciplinary knowledge production. The Model Forest (MF) concept, developed in Canada, is intended to encourage all dimensions of sustainable development through collaboration among stakeholders of forest resources in a geographical area. Because the MF approach encompasses both social and ecological systems, it can be seen as a process aimed at improving adaptive capacity to deal with uncertainty and change. We analyzed multi-stakeholder approaches used in four MF initiatives representing social–ecological systems with different governance legacies and economic histories in the northwest of the Russian Federation (Komi MF and Pskov MF) and in Sweden (Vilhelmina MF and the Foundation Säfsen Forests in the Bergslagen region). To describe the motivations behind development of the initiative and the governance systems, we used qualitative openended interviews and analyzed reports and official documents. The initial driving forces for establishing new local governance arrangements were different in all four cases. All MFs were characterized by multilevel and multi-sector collaboration. However, the distribution of power among stakeholders ranged from clearly top down in the Russian Federation to largely bottom up in Sweden. All MF initiatives shared three main challenges: (a) to develop governance arrangements that include representative actors and stakeholders, (b) to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to governance, and (c) to coordinate different sectors' modes of landscape governance. We conclude that, in principle, the MF concept is a promising approach to multi-stakeholder collaboration. However, to understand the local and regional dimensions of sustainability, and the level of adaptability of such multi-stakeholder collaboration initiatives, empirical studies of outcomes are needed. To assess the adaptive capacity, the states and trends of economic, ecological, social, and cultural dimensions in actual landscapes need to be linked to how the multistakeholder collaboration develops and performs over the long term.
Mining has a substantial influence on several parts of society, in part by providing economic and social development, but also through negative environmental and social-cultural impacts connected to its operation. This combination of both positive and negative effects induces a complex planning and permitting process concerning large and differentiated values, long time spans and large numbers of actors. The aim of this report is to conduct a survey of previous research on societal aspects on mines and mining conducted within political science in particular (and within a broader spectrum of other social sciences in general). The emphasis of the study is placed on identifying research focusing on how, and to what extent, political and institutional factors affect processes of mining development and subsequent serve to shape their outcomes. Results show that previous research has focused on the distribution of rights and resources in connection to development. Five main sub-categories are identified: national mining policies, indigenous rights, corporate social responsibility, company-community conflicts and environmental impacts. Research on how the development processes is impacted by the influence of e.g. public opinion and stakeholder core values, of interactions within the administrative system and of national and subnational policies has though largely been overlooked. ; Godkänd; 2012; 20120227 (ysko)
A monthly panel dataset was used to empirically examine the role of food prices in the emergence of social unrest in various geographic regions of Egypt between 1998 and 2013. A media discourse analysis traced reports in two leading Egyptian newspapers about social unrest, overall dissatisfaction with the government, and food price inflation. A fixed effects binary logit panel model has found that the probability of social unrest is statistically related to macroeconomic control variables such as domestic and global food prices, and GDP per capita. Higher temperatures were associated with an increased likelihood of social unrest through their influences on food production and yields, and price volatility in domestic food markets. In addition, the results support to the hypothesis that social unrest in developing countries has a strong "spatial" dimension, where urban dwellers were found to have a greater capacity to engage in collective action leading to social unrest. Finally, media reports about food price inflation were also statistically related to the occurrence of social unrest; but the estimated effect of overall dissatisfaction with institutional quality is even higher. Overall, the results suggest that soaring food prices, despite significant, were unlikely the single most important reason for social unrest in Egypt.
This thesis explores how the climate change-forest policy intersection is constituted in different contexts. Bringing together discourse analysis, feminist political theory and Governmentality studies, the thesis employs a critical governance approach and thus sheds light on indirect and subtle forms of governing. Embedded in the intergovernmental context of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Swedish national forest policy context, the analytical focus is on problematisations of climate change and forests, on (gendered) identity formations and how these overlap and differ in the two contexts. The thesis confirms how climate change entails a narrow conception of forests as carbon sinks, and demonstrates an ongoing categorisation of forests and forestry based on spatial locations that imply conservation of tropical forests, and intensive management of forests in countries like Sweden. In both contexts there is a rural-urban dichotomy that entails an implied difference between distant and immediate forest dependence that approaches a civilised/uncivilised differentiation. The associated steering techniques entail a focus on activating individuals such as female forest owners, on enabling poor forest dependent communities, or establishing global forest carbon trading, which distorts the contestable role of forests in climate change strategies. In the Swedish context, the analysis further demonstrates how climate change has become a forest production issue, how forests are abstracted from local contexts and an important part of the formation of a Swedish national identity. The image of consensus around Swedish forestry distorts domestic conflicts around forests. Finally, by drawing on feminist political theory this thesis bring attention to gendering practices in Swedish forest policy, and reveals deep rooted values in Swedish forest governance that continue to favor intensive forest production and economic revenues above publically defined goals connected to social and environmental concerns.
Objections to the current EU regulatory system on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in terms of high cost and lack of consistency, speed and scientific underpinning have prompted proposals for a more technology-neutral system. We sketch the conceptual background of the notion of 'technology neutrality' and propose a refined definition of the term. The proposed definition implies that technology neutrality of a regulatory system is a gradual and multidimensional feature. We use the definition to analyze two regulatory reform proposals: One proposal from the Netherlands for improving the exemption mechanism for GMOs under Directive 2001/18/EC, and one from the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board, outlining a new stratified risk assessment procedure. While both proposals offer some degree of improved technology neutrality in some dimensions compared to current EU regulation, in some extents and dimensions, they do not. We conclude that proposals for more technology-neutral regulation of GMOs need, first, to make explicit to what extent and in what dimensions the proposal improves neutrality and, second, to present arguments supporting that these specific improvements constitute desirable policy change against the background of objections to current policy.
This report explores how promotional communication between the bioeconomy-related stakeholders can foster the bioeconomy in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Poland. The material was collected during the BioBIGG project and is part of the work package 6. The purpose of the report is to present promotional strategies, actions and instruments that will support the transition towards a bioeconomy in the SBA. Primarily, the project activities inform this report and a specific focus is put on the influence of networks on national and local authorities.Firstly, the existing networks in the SBA and BSR are presented, followed by an analysis of how politics can be influenced in the four project partner countries. Based on the findings, the report suggests that the following communication ideas strengthen the bioeconomy: (1) Network formation is critical to share knowledge and foster cooperation between the different stakeholders. (2) Viewpoints should be effectively communicated to the relevant authorities. (3) Social media and the inclusion of customers prove to be effective ways to increase interest in bio-based products amongst society. (4) The ScanBalt Bioeconomy Working Group is an excellent tool to disseminate the project results.
Rural areas supply the planet's natural resources while simultaneously harbor refuges for most of the world's remaining biodiversity and intact, resilient ecosystems. Since traditional extractive activities must increasingly co-exist with non-exploitative activities such as tourism and conservation, sustainable land use planning is essential for managing trade-offs between incompatible interests in rural areas. With "communicative planning" being promoted since decades, participation is considered crucial for reconciling different planning interests. However, the implementation of participation remains patchy and uneven, not least in sparsely populated regions with low capacity where participation could be a game-changer. Here, we consider municipal comprehensive planning as an existing arena to explore participatory planning approaches potentially capable of simultaneously managing competing land uses and promoting sustainable development in sparsely populated rural contexts. Collaborative work between researchers and public managers resulted in the co-development of an approach based on qualitative village- and interest-based focus groups that facilitated the formulation, negotiation, and legitimization of concrete and detailed local guidelines that prioritize between different land uses. Consequently, the resulting comprehensive plan draft was more readily adopted than the output of a traditional planning process. We found that citizens in sparsely populated municipalities seem willing to actively contribute to rural development processes if they have significant influence.
The Centre for Regional Science at Umeå University (CERUM) and the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm has initiated a joint research effort concerning sustainable development. The general purpose of that comparative research program, which includes scientists from Sweden, Norway, the United States, Singapore, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan, is to analyze conditions for sustainable development in the rapidly developing economies of East Asia compared with the situation in Northern Europe. In this effort, sustainable development is analyzed as a complex interaction between economic growth, democratization and environmental concerns.This working paper is written in the context of this project by Jeanette Edblad at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University and is also her master thesis.
Successful conservation needs to be informed by social science because it is closely linked to socio-economic processesand human behaviour. Limited knowledge about ecosystems' interactions with these processes currentlyundermines conservation efforts. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of social science concerningthe world's largest multinationally-coordinated conservation infrastructure: the European Ecological Network- 'Natura 2000'. Based on a review of 149 publications, we analyse and discuss the main findings and outlinekey social-science research gapswith regard to the Natura 2000 network. The review shows that human dimensionof the Natura 2000 network is complex and variesamong EUMember States. In general, lowlevel and qualityof public participation in implementation of the Natura 2000 network and its management, negative public perceptionsof the network, lack of flexibility of responsible authorities and insufficient consideration of the localcontext pose the greatest challenges to the network's functioning. Important but hitherto little studied researchtopics include: evaluation of participation; effects of education on potential to raise public awareness; effects ofpotential financing mechanisms for compensating private land-owners; economic studies on cost-effectiveness;and benefits from conservation and ecosystem services. These knowledge gaps will need to be filled for theNatura 2000 network to reach its goals.
This paper presents and empirically evaluates an analytical experiment, in which individual level explanations of differences in political participation are translated to an organizational level. Utilizing the 'Civic Voluntarism Model' of participation research, we analyse consequences of voluntary associations' potentially politically valuable 'resources', 'motivation' and 'recruitment networks'. We use unique data from a survey of ethnic associations in Stockholm, Sweden—which may be considered as particularly interesting since in Swedish integration policy such associations are expected to fulfil a formal political role. Estimating a series of regression models, our results suggest that the overall logic of how associational level political participation is encouraged resembles corresponding mechanisms on the individual level. We find that quite basic resources, such as the number of members in a given association, promote participation; also when motivation, as reflected in assessed importance of political influence, is accounted for. Similarly, the results confirm that access to political networks stimulates political participation among voluntary associations. We conclude that both our theoretical argument and empirical findings merit further analyses of ethnic associations as well as other collective actors' political participation in accordance with the approach taken in this study.
