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The study conceptualizes economic forest sustainability as "the forest-related income and economic well-being sustained over time" and then compares Lithuania and Sweden at different scales. Sweden adopts a holistic perspective of the forest sector, where forestry and forest industries are perceived as a well-integrated economic branch. Forestry is expected to deliver raw material to forest industries, at the same time creating good preconditions for profitable forest management. Forest owners are given large freedom to act according to market signals and their own household needs, while the resulting intensive forest management cumulatively leads to a significant contribution to the country's welfare. Lithuania, in contrast, lacks an integrated sector perspective, forestry and forest industries being regarded as two separate realms. Private forest property rights are severely constrained by numerous legislative stipulations, leading to a significant reduction of economic value in production forests. On top of that, thirty percent of private owners face additional restrictions through forestland zoning, leading to further substantial loss of economic value. We suggest several measures for improving the economic forest sustainability in Lithuania, where a genuine national forest program could serve as a suitable bearing medium.

New policies in Sweden about intensive forestry and functional green infrastructure require involvement of different sectors for planning of landscapes and regions. However, Sweden has no territorial land-use planning at these spatial scales. Landowners, municipalities and regional governments work separately to implement policies about sustainability. There is thus a growing need for integrated spatial planning, and thus assessments of sustainability at local to regional levels by comparing monitoring results with norms expressed in policies. The aim of this thesis is to analyse and visualise such data using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to enhance comprehensive spatial planning approaches for cooperation between different planning sectors. In paper I, habitat functionality was modelled for area-demanding focal species' requirements in five coarse forest types. Also clear-felling rates within and outside functional habitats for each of four forest owner categories were measured. The differences among landowner categories concerning planning for ecological values were linked to how biodiversity-friendly their policies were. Papers II and III analyses how forest management affects two endangered species, and show that GIS-based proxy variables can be used to predict occurrence of both terrestrial and aquatic focal species. Paper IV assesses how Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) contributes to biodiversity conservation in Sweden and Russia. Analyses of structural connectivity and habitat functionality show that the minimum standard in FSC set-asides is not compatible with higher levels of ambition to maintain biodiversity. Paper V explores how planners, locals and tourists perceive landscape values, and how these can be interpreted and used in spatial planning. Paper VI demonstrates a zoning approach to identify green infrastructures and areas suitable for intensive forestry. In paper VII indicators for ecological, economical and socio-cultural values were summarised to compare municipalities' sustainability. To conclude, there are large opportunities for analysing and visualising data to support integrated spatial planning about sustainability using GIS. However, there is a need for new education programs including all dimensions of sustainability in combination with use of GIS.

Much of the effort to address environmental issues at the local level has focused on defining principles and aims rather than addressing the operational difficulties of implementation. Drawing upon insights from sustainability scholarship, this study reviews two cases: the development of a Swedish standard for implementing sustainable development at municipality, county council, and regional levels, and attempts by a small rural municipality to establish a process towards implementing the Aalborg Commitments. The research illustrates the specific organizational and managerial complexity of these case study experiences. It concludes that an organizational focus on integration and mainstreaming deserves particular attention to achieve broader sustainability, or related environmental or adaptation goals. The results, in particular, highlight the role that integrated management systems can play for sustainability work at the local level.

Sustainability reporting has grown in importance and transparency over the years. The reporting has in many countries gone from being voluntarily to become mandatory. This is the case within the EU, which adopted the non-financial reporting directive (2014/95/EU) in 2014. Sweden applied the directive in 2017 in the Annual Account Act. At the same time as the requirements have increased research has showed there is a gap between the content of the disclosed reports and companies' actual sustainability activities. To create a reliable and transparent external sustainability report there is a need to take internal activities into account and collect data for reporting from internal management and control systems. Previous research has also recognised that sustainability needs to be a part of the corporate strategy in order to ensure that sustainability becomes a part of the business operations. In order to contribute to a deeper understanding of any deficiencies between the information provided in sustainability reports and the internal activities the aim of this study is to investigate and explain the implementation of environmental strategies in company's management and controls system. Swedish companies operating in industries with a high environmental impact, the forest-, paper-, mining-, and steel industry, are selected as research objects in this study. A deductive method in combination with a hermeneutic method is applied. Management control systems, corporate sustainability strategy, legal requirements, the Global Reporting Initiative and accounting postulates form the theoretical framework. The empirical result shows there is a gap between the communicated environmental strategies and the implementation in the company management control system in each of the three industries. The result of the study raises questions regarding what the goal is for the communicated environmental strategies and to what extent the strategies are implemented. Another conclusion is that the companies in the three industries do not comply with the GRI framework, when reporting a limited number of environmental performance indicators. In addition, despite of a mandatory regulation for disclosing of non-financial information and the use of a common framework there is no common reporting standard for companies in the studied industries. External stakeholders need to have access to relevant non-financial information to assess companies' impact on the environment. Current legislation and standard frameworks provide a high level of flexibility regarding what to report. In order to achieve a common standard this study shows a need to add a conceptual sustainable framework for accounting and reporting, enforcement mechanisms and regulated common standards to achieve a more transparent and reliable reporting practice.

Sustainable development aims at addressing economic, social, and environmental concerns, but the current lack of responsive environmental governance hinders progress. Short-term economic development has led to limited actions, unsustainable resource management, and degraded ecosystems. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may continue to fall short of achieving significant progress without a better understanding of how ecosystems contribute to achieving sustainability for all people. Ecosystem governance is an approach that integrates the social and ecological components for improved sustainability and includes principles such as adaptive ecosystem co-management, subsidiarity, and telecoupling framework, as well as principles of democracy and accountability. We explain the importance of ecosystem governance in achieving the SDGs, and suggest some ways to ensure that ecosystem services are meaningfully considered. This paper reflects on how integration of these approaches into policies can enhance the current agenda of sustainability.

Sheep production in Sweden is an agricultural sector that today exists merely as a small niche, despite its agroecological potential. Through literature research, a survey and 18 semi-structured interviews, this paper defines the sector's marginality and attempts to explain it. The effects of the sector's marginality on the sustainability of Swedish sheep farming and agriculture as a whole are evaluated. Finally, desirable directions for development of the Swedish sheep sector are suggested. The findings showed that the marginality of the Swedish sheep sector to a large extent is a product of socio-cultural factors that affect the structure of the sheep sector. Not least, the sector's marginality reinforces itself. In addition, bio-physical, historical and political circumstances have played a role in marginalising the sector. Several weaknesses and strengths regarding sustainability were recognized within the current, small-scale structures of Swedish sheep farming. Opportunities were identified through which the sheep sector could actually contribute to agricultural sustainability precisely through its marginality. Equally, threats to sustainability that arise from the sector being limited to its niche were acknowledged. Overall, the findings suggest that it would be beneficial for the Swedish sheep sector to grow if agroecological, sustainable farming is the ultimate goal. Whether this growth can and will be achieved, however, is questionable.

Human activity affects planetary systems that support living on Earth and the food systems is a large contributor to overstepping the planetary boundaries. Global and national sustainability aims include targets for organic food production, during the latest years many countries have grown their organic food market share. However, the Swedish organic food market share growth stopped in 2016. The purpose of this study is to understand why the decline of the Swedish market share growth occurred and what the future might hold for the organic food category. This qualitative study has aimed to find answers through interviews with initiated persons in the Swedish food system. Results indicate that many changes in the political and societal landscape pressured the Organic food and the Organic food category transformed into the new Sustainability food category, presenting more competition for organic labelled food, together with plant-based, vegetarian and climate-friendly food. The rise of Swedish produced food, increasingly important from a national self-sufficiency and survival perspective, should be viewed as sustainable, and is also a competitor of organic food. The shine of organic food is often lost in the multi-faceted competition with the other sustainability and Swedish foods, but the market share has stayed at a stable level since 2016. Looking to the future, the new sustainability food category in Sweden will contain organic food but also locally produced food, that has been produced with more effective and environmentally friendly methods. The Swedish climate presents difficulties for year-round agriculture and the aim to become more self-sufficient needs to include locally produced meat, dairy, vegetable, and plant-based foods, indicating a need to focus innovation and development on Swedish food production and conservation methods. Socio-environmental sustainability aspects in Swedish food production, such as the unhealthy effects of mineral fertilizers and pesticide on all living species, should be ...

This thesis aims to create an understanding of how structures affect grain producers' work with sustainability, and to investigate if perennial grains can be part of the future grain production in Sweden. The agricultural sector is facing a dilemma, both to ensure that ecosystem services are kept intact but also to keep up the global food supply for the growing population. Today's efficient industrial agriculture has contributed to increased emissions and the sector needs a sustainability transition. The food and agriculture industry has a strongly institutionalised structure, which means that fundamental changes take a particularly long time. Swedish grain producers are affected by structures from different levels within the sector which affect their possibility to act sustainable within their business. The current cultivation systems with annual grains requires a lot of tillage which contributes to a lot of emissions. Perennial grains are used in other countries but not yet integrated into the Swedish agricultural sector. The ongoing research development of perennial grains in Sweden is to adapt the crop to the Nordic climate and to develop a perennial grain that can be compared with the current yield and profitability of annual grains. The data collection in this thesis has been conducted through semi-structured interviews with six grain producers in Skaraborg, Västra Götaland. The theoretical framework in the thesis consists of structuration theory and sustainability transitions. The concept duality within structuration theory with structures and actions are applied on the different MLP-levels within sustainability transitions to analyse how the selected grain producers are affected by structures from the different levels and how their individual agency is affected. The results reveal that the institutionalised structures affect the grain producers' attitude towards sustainability within their business through both change inertia and the fear of lowered profitability. Joint structural changes within politics, research and development, consumers, and the grain producers themselves; are needed before the respondent perceives an opportunity to act more sustainably within their day-to-day operations. Most of the respondents consider perennial grains to be more interesting if they had better characteristics such as higher profitability, higher yield, and a higher market demand. The attitude towards perennial grains is positive but the perceived risk of low profitability inhibits implementation. By analysing the grain producers' own context with selected theoretical framework: This study shows that a supporting system is needed that enables increased profitability for sustainable initiatives and sustainability through all levels. Researchers and retailers are important actors in creating resources and structures that make it easy for grain producers to act sustainably. The grain producers themselves need to take risks when they are in situations where they have a choice to act sustainably.

Public catering can have a considerable environmental and educational impact. A scenario of more legume and less meat consumption in Sweden was in the present study used as a tool to explore the possibilities of Swedish public school meals to become more sustainable. Strong structuration theory provided a focus on organisational structure and stakeholder influence, enabling a holistic view of the issue at hand. A literature review, on the topics of successful implementation of sustainability projects within public catering and individual agency within school meals, provided a knowledge base from which an online survey and a guide for complementary interviews were built. The survey was aimed at municipal dietary managers and assessed their experiences of working with sustainable school meals and their attitudes towards the dietary scenario. Furthermore, the survey tried out a way of measuring how much legumes and meat are served in school canteens. The complementary interviews focused on individual actors' perceived agency to act for sustainable change. The results suggest that the study participants in general have both the knowledge and interest to make school meals more sustainable. They also saw the more legumes dietary scenario as desirable. Complicating factors are that the priorities of catering organisations and schools are often not well aligned, and resources are lacking to work on collaborations to improve this. It is also often unclear who has the responsibility to make sure teaching on sustainability is carried over from the classroom to the canteen. Individual agents with a high motivation to make positive change can be important drivers of sustainability projects, but for a change such as significantly greener school meals to take place, a whole food culture needs to change. Educational efforts and finding ways of engaging multiple stakeholders in the decisions are needed to this end. Unambiguous political goals, with adequate action plans, would give structure to the work on more sustainable school meals. Finding ways of quantifying and comparing sustainability efforts between municipalities would draw attention to the importance of the matter. The approach that was tried out in the present study however proved to be too impractical to use.

Social sustainability in urban places is undervalued in urban planning due to the intangible nature of the concept. By valuing lived experiences of place, this research connects social and environmental sustainability pillars to support planning for socioenvironmental justice from a citizen's perspective. The quality of the urban outdoor environment is explored in relation to safety and individual and collective efficacy for social wellbeing which contextualises the role of urban green space. This study suggests socio-environmental sustainability is related at an individual and collective level. Safe social environments can support place attachment processes and safe green spaces can support self-regulation of emotions that influences behaviours. The urban outdoors can be viewed as a social learning environment. An inductive interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) led enquiry has been conducted which suggests urban places for social wellbeing can be explained by a framework that integrates social and environmental psychology and spatial politics theories. This study suggests that place attachment is at the heart of dynamic social environments and influences social learning behaviours through vicarious learning and the manifestation of social spaces as framed by Scannell and Gifford's Tripartite Framework of Place Attachment, Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory and Lefebvre's Theory of Produced Social Space. Designing for socio-environmental justice is associated with understanding human irrationality due to poor social and environmental quality. This research suggests the right to feeling safe and the quality of the urban environment, including safe green spaces, becomes an issue for the operation of democracy and facilitating self and collective efficacy, by recognising the invisible bricks that form urban places for social wellbeing.

The purpose of IPBES assessments is to depict how the natural world and human societies interact with each other on a conceptual level. Habitat degradataion, eutrophication, fishing and climate change are examples of drivers of change that affect Nordic coastal habitats. Policy and governance are principal indirect drivers that both could lead to decline and deteriorations, as well as improvements and recoveries environments. Climate change will affect Nordic marine biodiversity profoundly in the future by changes in, for example, bio-chemical cycles and in the distribution of biodiversity. Such changes might lead to increased oxygen depletion in many areas, leakage of nutrients, changed thropic structures and spread of pathogens. It is therefore of paramount importance that effective governance is developed to mitigate impacts on nature's contributions to people (NCP) and to build sustainability and strategies for sustainability. Less overfishing, less euthropication, fewer pollutants and better land-use and nature protection are measures that will improve the overall resilience of Nordic coastal environments.

Bergslagen in south-central Sweden is an informal region with a long history of intensive land use. The legacies of than 2000 years of integrated use of ore, forests and water major national and international economic importance now involve several challenges for the maintenance of landscapes. This includes sustainability of rural and urban communities, of green infrastructures for natural capital and human well-being as well as of forests, river basins and mining. In response to this cross-sectoral integration necessary at multiple levels of public, private and civil as well as academia and schools. Landscapes need thus to be viewed as integrated socio-ecological systems. Collaboration and continuous learning among actors and stakeholders are needed for sustainable use and management of landscapes' goods, services and values. To support this requires (1) data, monitoring and assessment of different aspects of sustainability, (2) continuous knowledge production about material and immaterial landscape values relevant for the management of ecological, economic, social and cultural dimensions, (3) information and communication using both traditional media, as well as (4) through art and culture. the vision to contribute to satisfying these requirements Sustainable Bergslagen initiative emerged gradually since 2004 as a multi-level partnership for sustainable landscapes (www.bergslagen.org). By joining the International Model Forest Network (IMFN), and the network for Long Term Socio-Economic and Ecological Research (LTSER), actors and stakeholders can learn from other regions' sustainable development processes, and make Bergslagen more visible internationally.

This mainly deductive study examines what factors explain the variation of e-democracy and if, why a causal pathway exists. The deductive feature is carried out through examining the predictions of the modernization theory, testing hypotheses concerning the link between economic development and wealth in relation to e-democracy. Deriving from a theoretical point of departure where e-democracy is conceptualized with the help of democratic theory, this phenomenon is studied in three different but linked empirical parts. A cross-sectional global study did establish a relationship between some of the indicators derived from the theory; however, the magnitude of the explanatory power was lower at the level of e-democracy than at the level of democracy. A cross-sectional national study of all Sweden's municipalities did show that especially high levels of education were clearly related to high levels of e-democracy. Approaching the questions of causal mechanisms and deviations from the found pattern, case studies did emphasize that the linkage between the structural conditions and actor's-orientated explanations largely could verify what is deducted from theory. However, the importance of economic possibilities and internal prioritizations inside the political organization was essential for the development of e-democracy and was found through more inductive approaches. The main contribution of this thesis is the results that, both on an aggregated and a micro level, verify the theory but also add other important explanations. Another important conclusion is the creation of a model for e-democracy where a complete e-democracy is linked to democratic theory and not only maintains information, discussion, and decision-making processes through information and communication technology but also does this while strengthening political participation and political equality. ; PECOI

Many natural resources have degraded and collapsed despite being managed under rigorous institutional frameworks set up to ensure rational exploitation. Path dependency of dysfunction institutions has been suggested as an explanation for such undesired outcomes. We explore the role of path dependency in natural resource management by studying a 100-year evolution of Swedish fisheries. We rely on three main types of original longitudinal data collected for the period 1914–2016: (A) policy documents, (B) government spending on management and subsidies, and (C) catch and fleet data. Our analysis contrasts the periods before and after the Swedish entrance into the European Union (1995) because this marks the year when fisheries policy became beyond the direct influence of the Swedish government. We uncover four pieces of evidence suggesting the existence of a path dependent dynamic in the pre-EU period: (1) despite increasing insights on the vulnerability of fish stocks to overexploitation, national policy goals in relation to fisheries continuously promoted incompatible goals of social and economic growth but without any reference to the sustainability of the biological resources; (2) the same policy instruments were used over long periods; (3) actor constellations within the fisheries policy subsystem were stable over time; (4) neither political regime nor macroeconomic variables and fisheries performance (industry production, oil price, landing values) could explain observed temporal variation in subsidies. We conclude that key policy actors in the pre-EU period formed an "iron triangle" and thereby prevented necessary policy changes. These national reinforcing feedbacks have been weakened since EU entrance, and the indicators for path dependency show broader involvement of stakeholders, a shift in spending, and policy goals that now explicitly address ecological sustainability.

The Canadian federal government has introduced policy to phase out coal-fired electricity generation by 2030, as part of its climate change mitigation commitments under the Paris Agreement. The policy plan, positioned as a just transition, includes funding and measures to help workers and communities manage economic difficulties arising from the coal phaseout. Sustainability transitions, however, are rarely a purely economic process, as changes in demographics, values, norms and meanings may also ensue. Understanding this process as one of symbolic coping, wherein coal communities must socially come to terms with the phaseout and the resulting threat to their identities, adds another dimension to the just transition concept. This study aimed to better understand the social-psychological processes of sense-making in sustainability transitions, by investigating how coal communities are understanding and coping with the coal phaseout, and how social representations of the coal industry are transforming as a result. Social representations theory (SRT) was the main conceptual framework used, as it explores group-level common-sense understandings, which can be useful in analyzing processes of disruption or transition. Through qualitative case study research in two coal producing communities in Saskatchewan, one of four Canadian provinces affected by the coal phaseout, I explored the dynamics of the social representation of the local coal industry. Using the central core approach to SRT, I identified a core element based in shared history, stability and prosperity, which seemed to provide a foundation for making sense of the coal phaseout policy. From this foundation, I found two models of social representation transformation, resisting and progressive, implicating a split in the social representation of community life after coal. With this theoretical application, I explored social implications of the Canadian coal phaseout, illustrated a model of social representation transformation, and demonstrated a framework that can be applied to transition research in other contexts. I also discussed potential governance implications for designing just transition policies.