This paper reveals that Swedish game management policy is often ignored by local landowners who instead use alternative, legitimate, but often illegal informal rules: proxy policy. In consequence, a number of game management policy goals still remain unattained since their introduction in 1981. This circumstance adds weight to the premise that implementing natural resource management policies that lack legitimacy trigger permanent and costly conflicts between stakeholders. Ironically, the corporative state, via its judicial process, can only enforce policy if conflicts of interest come to its attention. Therefore, it is argued that if natural resource management is to be effective as well as efficient a more collaborative and legitimate Swedish policy making process is imperative. Adapted from the source document.
This thesis investigates how conflicts of interest among local hunting interests affect the legitimacy of the Swedish government's goals on hunting. These goals aim to give non-landowning and small landowning hunters an opportunity to hunt more and bigger game, as well as improving game management. A case-study was carried out in the county of Norrbotten among its Game Management Associations (GMAs) in 2004 to determine which kinds of conflicts of interest existed there. This association is part of hunting policy, since it was empowered and proliferated in the beginning of the 1980s to implement the formal rules in the Game Management Association Act (1980). It is assumed to be representative of local hunting in general. Lingering informal rules have been found to govern hunting locally in Norr-botten and show no sign of weakening. Thus, conflicts of interest, especially majority-minority conflicts between landowners and renthunters become permanent. Small game hunting and the issuing of hunting permits are, in particular, governed by informal rules, while the suspension of hunters is often the result of the arbitrary use of formal rules. These two issues involve mostly renthunters. Even the content of formal rules in policy can also cause conflict in GMAs. For instance, the 33§ in the Game Management Association Act has become legally and ideologically controversial, since it makes it difficult for landowners to remove their properties from GMAs, and, thus, from a European legal perspective, encroaches on both their property rights and exercise of individual rights. The thesis also reveals that administrative contexts and structural attributes influence conflicts of interest in GMAs. For instance, small game hunters in moose management areas are in conflict with their boards to a greater extent than their counterparts in hunting licence areas. The size of a GMA and the presence of non-local hunters are also factors that influence conflicts of interest in GMAs. Hunting policy has met resistance from local informal rules and the remnants of old policy rules, so-called 'ghost policies'. For example, less than half of appealed GMAs between 1981 and 2003 used formal rules when making decisions. Thus, the goals concerning increasing the number of hunting opportunities in Sweden have not yet been fulfilled. Neither has game management improved. Ironically, this is caused by the presence of non- landowning non-local hunters, the very group of hunters the government's goals on hunting focus on. Nevertheless, small landowning hunters are satisfied with the amount of game they can hunt in the GMA. ; Godkänd; 2006; 20061205 (haneit)
Based on the synthesis of outside versus inside perspectives, this paper weighs the positive attributes of the so-called deprived place against its negative media image. Applying the concept of territorial stigmatization, small-scale citizen science was conducted to gain a unique understanding of the Swedish neighborhood from within. With the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11 in mind, this approach enables researchers to reach otherwise difficult to access young urban outcasts and probe the potential to overcome their community's lack of political influence. An overlap between local media narratives and urban outcasts' perceptions of "drug and crime" and "football and school" was revealed. Yet, this first-generation study also painted a somewhat different picture of the stigmatized neighborhood, supplying new insights about places that matter most for marginalized young males. In this Swedish case, their pictures revealed that the local corner market, football court and youth club act as an antidote for the effects of stigmatization. This Our Voice citizen science initiative proved to be a good measure of two communities' abilities to withstand stigmatization, which is either tainted by false perceptions from the outside or weakened by crime from within. Finally, attempting to bypass structural discrimination, citizen scientists' findings and researchers' conclusions were made available to students, colleagues and guests at a poster presentation hosted by Mälardalen University and to concerned politicians from Eskilstuna City Hall as well as the broader public via a local Swedish television station.
