Umeå University's logo

Vi uppmanar regeringen att kraftfullt stärka en grön omställning grundad i demokratiskt deltagande, tillit och långsiktighet. I stället för att se kritik och gnissel som hinder måste regeringen stärka processer för att lyfta fram perifera områdens perspektiv och redan i planeringsstadiet överbrygga orättvisor mellan olika platser och samhällsgrupper regionalt, nationellt och internationellt, skriver ett stort antal forskare.

This article explores the dynamic interplay between climate change, people, and regions heavily dependent on forests. Based on Levine’s form analysis, it conceptualizes climate as a relational pattern where collisions between different forms create interstices, opening avenues for alternative comprehension and action. The article argues that climate change is not an external phenomenon but an integrated process that shapes forests and communities, challenging established national forestry frameworks. By rooting the global climate crisis in the forest and its local cultural context, the results reveal climate change as a multifaceted issue, offering opportunities for reconfigurations and kaleidoscopic changes. Through two collaborative processes conducted in northern and southern Sweden, the study highlights how local perspectives and historical practices can foster subtle yet transformative shifts in collective perceptions, ultimately reshaping how societies understand and address the climate crisis.

Denna antologi är resultatet av tre workshops vid Umeå universitet, Uppsala universitet och online under 2023 och 2024, där forskare träffades och diskuterade aktuell och framtida forskning om skogsarbete. Alla deltagande forskare från våra organisationer bjöds in att bidra med sina perspektiv till antologin och arbetsgruppen Future Forests bjöd även in andra forskare att bidra.

Denna version är en översättning av den ursprungliga antologin med titeln Green Dreams and Workforce Reality som publicerades 2024.

Climate change requires locally tailored solutions that consider diverse environmental and cultural contexts. This study situates climate action within Sweden's forest landscapes, exploring how local forest stakeholders prioritize and motivate climate action targets for immediate implementation. By engaging in knowledge co-production processes in local communities, we sought to develop place-based climate action pathways, rooted in stakeholders' visions for their communities' futures. We identified three main climate action pathways: forest-based bioeconomy, localism, and global systemic change. These pathways varied in policy targets, governance directions, focus of change, and preferred economic systems. We found that while the pathways generally aligned with the underlying assumptions of overarching scenario archetypes, their ideological differences regarding governance and policy levels and directions were less distinct. Moreover, despite differing foci and perspectives, forest management strategies were similar in all pathways. The ideological dimensions of the climate action pathways became less visible when considering the management of forests. Our findings underscore the embeddedness of local climate action within broader environmental, social, and political structures, and the challenges of linking local landscape understandings to global environmental processes. While practical, locally specific solutions can transcend ideological debates, they may also obscure necessary ideological and political considerations for effective land use and management strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This study analyzes the transition to mechanized forest management and the implementation of sustainable-yields forestry in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s. The objective is to produce insights that are relevant for policymakers working with forests and the climate transition today. The analysis focuses on how the Swedish National Association of Forest Owners’ Associations (SSR)—an association organizing non-industrial forest owners—used courses, technological trials, and other “knowledge brokering” initiatives to engage forest owners in mechanization and the pursuit of sustainable yields. The study argues that the SSR’s innovative approach to knowledge brokering formed a bottom-up perspective that enabled learning about, formed identities around, facilitated commitment to, and fostered legitimacy for the envisioned transition. Knowledge brokering thus functioned as a lubricant to smooth the transitional machinery. Learning from the past, the study suggests that contemporary policymakers can benefit from investing in grassroots mobilization as well as in active and conscious knowledge brokering.

The article explores how Sweden’s engagement with the forests of the Baltics and Russia in the early 1990s was shaped by a discourse that cast these regions as peripheral. This discourse, we argue, revived historical narratives tied to 19th-century of Swedish forestry expansion toward the north, similarly, positioning the eastern forests a century later as underutilized spaces that could benefit from Swedish forestry expertise and modernization. We connect to historical phenomena and conceptualizations of center-periphery dynamics as a framework for our analysis. To identify narratives revolving around the forests in the Baltics and Russia under the center-periphery discourse, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of media sources from the Swedish forestry organization Skogen [The Forest] and Swedish regional and national newspapers from 1991 to 1994. In this article, we outline two key narratives that surfaced from our empirical findings. One narrative focuses on the notion that forest resources in the Baltics and Russia were finite and increasingly contested due to growing demand and restricted availability. The second narrative presents optimized forest management and professional forestry knowledge as solutions to these constraints, framing the eastern forests as potentially limitless if managed with the right expertise. We conclude our analysis of the historical narratives with a brief outlook on the recent developments of Swedish forestry portrayals of forests in the Baltics and Russia.

This article examines how and by whom the future of glacial energy was imagined in Greenland between the 1950s and 1970s, with a specific emphasis on the intersection of discourses of energy and political autonomy. The focus lies on the years from 1953, marking the end of Greenland’s colonial status and its integration into the realm of its former colonial authority, Denmark, until 1979, when the Greenland Home Rule Agreement was enacted. The futures of hydropower are explored through the lens of energy imaginaries, a notion that underscores the interconnectedness between different forms of energy and the organization of social structures. These imaginaries revolving around hydropower circulated in the public-political space in Greenland decades prior to when the first operational hydropower plant came online in 1993. Through a historical empirical analysis, this article identifies the energy imaginaries linked to envisioned hydropower and delineates key phases of their emergence. It also discusses these envisioned futures of hydropower in the historical context of Arctic oil exploration and Greenland’s strivings toward political autonomy. The energy imaginaries of hydropower, especially glacial hydropower generated adjacent to Greenland’s inland icesheet, built on a long-term timeline and autonomous society, in contrast to the oil development that was favoured by Danish authorities at the time. Ultimately, it was the considerations of the sources and scale of the necessary investments that deferred the implementation of hydropower until the late 1980s. However, the groundwork for viewing Greenland’s water resources as a cornerstone for its future independence had been laid.