Sweden is undergoing an extensive transformation from single species management towards ecosystem-based management. This study analyses the implementation of the new moose management system, focusing on the newly formed partnerships at ecosystem level (the moose management areas) and their potential to ease conflicts between participants and develop into sustainable collaborations that enable ecosystem-based management. Empirical evidence was obtained from semi-structured interviews with involved actors (hunters, landowners, wildlife managers and forest consultants) in five Swedish counties. Several challenges, based on the participants’ abilities, willingness and understanding needed to implement the new management system, were identified. Lack of funding, unclear roles and responsibilities appear to be the most serious issues. If these are not properly solved, then they have the potential to hamper and aggravate the implementation of the new management system, that is, the ecosystem-based management, as well as the partnership arrangement.
This study examines differences in how international regimes for the establishment and management of protected areas have been implemented in Norway and Sweden. We focus on regulatory and normative pathways of international influence, which mirror the distinction between legal and non-legal regimes in international environmental law. Sweden and Norway have essentially responded similarly to the regulatory regimes that apply to both countries. The more normative regimes have influenced them in different ways – primarily by strengthening traditional nature conservation norms in Sweden, and norms about sustainable use by local communities in Norway. The findings indicate that the normative pathway is important mainly as a support for domestic policies that correspond to existing national norms and discourses, and they support the proposition that a high degree of regulatory hardness contributes to increase the level and consistency of implementation.
This article identifies three interrelated challenges concerning the ecosystem services (ES) framework and the nature of landscape dynamics within the context of landscape management. These challenges are set within a problematic externalization of nature inherent in the ES framework. The first challenge concerns the lack of compatibility between the ES framework and the logics of landscapes. The second challenge addresses the complexity of ecosystems, unsubstitutable values, and intangible dimensions in economic valuation when applied to landscapes. The third challenge points at how the ES framework has problems in accounting for how and why sociocultural processes are crucial to environmental attitudes and behavior. We argue that the idea of landscape and its inherent landscape dynamics, a crosscutting dimension of these challenges, is a missed opportunity for the ES framework in order to take immeasurable and context-specific social and cultural processes more seriously and consequently deliver sounder advice on landscape management. We thus make a plea for the importance of creating platforms for dialogue across research communities working to improve the understanding of human–nature dynamics.