Is the EU barking up the wrong tree? - A study on Swedish stakeholders' perspectives on the means and conditions for establishing a more coordinated European agenda on forests

Abstract

Forests are becoming an increasingly important tool for the EU in its fight against climate change following the introduction of the Union’s Green Deal and the recent Forest Strategy for 2030. However, since forest policy in itself is not an EU competence, but instead a national competence decided and managed by the individual Member States, this makes any attempts from Brussels to shape forest policies in a certain direction a sensitive matter, not least for forest-rich Sweden. Given this background, this study set out to explore what attitudes and positions exist among different interest groups within the Swedish forest community toward the creation of a more harmonized forest agenda in the EU and the policy instruments by which such an agenda should be formulated. In doing so, a qualitative study was conducted through a total of 7 online, semi-structured interviews with a selection of both forest owner interest groups of varying size and environmental interest groups. The results of this study illustrate both important differences as well as similarities between the interest groups interviewed. Forest owners emphasized values related to the substitution of fossil material and social sustainability to be better considered under an EU forest agenda, while the environmental groups instead pushed for aspects such as biodiversity, democratic ownership of forests, and/or recreation. However, both sides agreed that a harmonized EU forest agenda must allow for separate solutions based on each Member State’s national context. In terms of what practical instruments different interests preferred, a clear preference for soft policy instruments could be seen among the forest owner interest groups Mellanskog, Södra and SCA, while the government-owned forest company Sveaskog instead preferred a mixture of soft and hard policy instrument in line with the collective opinion of the environmental groups Greenpeace, Naturskyddsföreningen and WWF.