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Forests are essential to the global green transition, but intensified management may undermine environmental goals. Continuous cover forestry (CCF) offers an alternative, balancing timber production and ecosystem conservation. We investigated the legislative and technical feasibility of CCF in riparian buffers along freshwaters, where it could potentially restore simplified stands and better protect water. We analyzed EU, national, and global policies identifying barriers and enablers and used GIS data from 11 Swedish sites estimating the share of productive forest converted to CCF under varying buffer widths. Results show CCF in riparian buffers is feasible, with few legislative barriers and several soft enablers. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation is a key enabler, as CCF-managed buffers can contribute to restoration targets, providing opportunities for different property sizes to meet multiple management objectives. Future feasibility depends on EU member states’ implementation of the regulation and alignment of ecological goals with political and economic conditions.

Addressing the intertwined challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change requires rapid, intentional societal shifts. UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs), established as interdisciplinary learning hubs for sustainable development, offer significant potential to bridge global commitments and local action. However, their effectiveness is hampered by structural, institutional, and perceptional/ideational challenges. This review identifies and categorizes these challenges, highlighting issues such as socioeconomic inequalities, governance constraints, and narrative complexities. Our analysis of 42 recent studies reveals that while BRs could serve as ‘living labs’ for transformative change, their impact is limited by these challenges. There are numerous indications that the development of BRs is at a critical juncture. If the identified challenges are not addressed, there is a risk that the role of BRs will be marginalized in the future, rather than evolving into key arenas that contribute to the transformative change we urgently need.

In recent decades, collaboration has become a common policy instrument in public administration, both internationally and in Sweden. Inspired by scholarly literature on collaborative governance, the aim of this study is to analyze the crucial role of public administration in the design and implementation of collaborative governance. Drawing on several years of research on Swedish forest policy and governance, our work is based on extensive empirical material, including 88 semi-structured interviews, observations, written comments from open public consultations and actors, enacted policy documents, open public hearings and a survey. Our results confirm that factors related to process design strongly affect the outputs and outcomes of collaboration in public administration. We assert that public officials should meticulously design and adapt the collaborative process during its initiation and progress, according to the policy problem and actors' incentives and motivations to participate. However, despite good intentions by public officials, the overarching priorities and contextual factors governing the policy area must be set by elected decision makers at an early stage to establish democratic accountability and high levels of policy legitimacy and acceptance. A major implication for public administration is that the increasing use of collaborative governance may be highly inefficient if it is difficult for participants to draft shared objectives and provide intended outputs because of low levels of trust, and different interpretations of knowledge and norms. Finally, in contentious policy areas, such as forest policy, political priorities must sometimes be set by elected decision makers rather than through collaborative processes.

Governments increasingly apply collaborative governance based on deliberation that typically takes place in non-majoritarian institutions. However, collaborative institutions face accountability challenges depending on their institutional design. Still, empirical research is missing on the different choices member states make when designing collaborative institutions implementing European Union (EU) political goals. Using four theoretical principles of accountability, the study compares how Finland and Sweden implement the requirements for collaborative governance of two EU directives in national legislation and management plans. While Finland has provided more detailed and stricter rules resulting in higher process accountability, Sweden has delegated final decision making to authorities, achieving a higher degree of institutional independence. The results reveal that since the directives set only some of the key rules and procedures needed for achieving accountable collaborative institutions, member states’ discretion can lead to institutional variation even in similar governance contexts, resulting in differing institutional accountability and legitimacy of EU policies.

In the framework of the EU Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP), a new multidisciplinary course “Heat loss in buildings and sustainability: local approaches to global problems” was designed and implemented in collaboration between three European universities. The aim was to introduce engineering and architecture students to sustainability and systems thinking in relation to energy use in buildings. Together with conventional lecturing and seminars, a mixture of online, in-person, theoretical and unconventional hands-on teaching methods and activities was applied, including, lectures, discussion seminars, experiments and a role-play. This approach required the strong involvement and collaboration of the teaching staff, who, by combining different disciplines and collaborating across universities and national boundaries, acquired invaluable pedagogical experience. Most importantly, students from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds were exposed to a mixture of subjects that they might not otherwise have experienced in their engineering and architecture programmes, i.e., policy and governance, physics, and energy systems. In this way, the course laid the foundations for systems thinking and a sustainability mindset. 

Media content analysis was used with the aim of developing an understanding of how the debate on large-scale wind power has played out over time in Sweden, especially in relation to the enactment of national interest areas for wind power. Covering the period 1999 to 2019 and using NVivo for coding and analysis, we reviewed a total of 788 articles in both national and regional daily newspapers. To identify which actors are present in media and how they frame large-scale wind power, we conducted a frame analysis by applying three theoretical elements developed by previous media studies. The first is a diagnostic element used to pinpoint the cause to a problem, the second a prognostic element used to pinpoint the solution to a problem, and the third a motivating element used to identify the person(s) or object(s) suffering from the problem, that is, victim. Our results emphasize that wind power in recent years has been framed as a solution more often than a cause to a problem. One prevailing framing is the localization of large-scale wind power per se and conflicts with other land-uses and national interests. We also identify a tension between international and national policy objectives and local implementation of large-scale wind power. Governmental agencies are the most common framers over time, together with individuals (e.g. locals and second home owners) and wind entrepreneurs. Importantly, whereas politicians and wind entrepreneurs most often frame wind power as a solution, individuals frame it as a cause to a problem.

Riparian buffers are the primary tool in forest management for protecting the habitat structure and function of streams. They help protect against biogeochemical perturbation, filter sediments and nutrients, prevent erosion, contribute food to aquatic organisms, regulate light and hence water temperature, contribute deadwood, and preserve biodiversity. However, in production forests of Sweden and Finland, many headwater streams have been straightened, ditched, and/or channelized, resulting in altered hydrology and reduced natural disturbance by floods, which in turn affects important riparian functions. Furthermore, in even-aged management systems as practiced in much of Fennoscandia, understory trees have usually been cleared right up to the stream’s edge during thinning operations, especially around small, headwater streams. Fire suppression has further favored succession towards shade tolerant species. In the regions within Fennoscandia that have experienced this combination of intensive management and lack of natural disturbance, riparian zones are now dominated by single-storied, native Norway spruce. When the adjacent forest is cut, thin (5 - 15m) conifer-dominated riparian buffers are typically left. These buffers do not provide the protection and subsidies, in terms of leaf litter quality, needed to maintain water quality or support riparian or aquatic biodiversity. Based on a literature review, we found compelling evidence that the ecological benefits of multi-layered, mixed-species riparian forest with a large component of broadleaved species are higher than what is now commonly found in the managed stands of Fennoscandia. To improve the functionality of riparian zones, and hence the protection of streams in managed forest landscapes, we present some basic principles that could be used to enhance the ecological function of these interfaces. These management actions should be prioritized on streams and streamside stands that have been affected by simplification either through forest management or hydrological modification. Key to these principles is the planning and managing of buffer zones as early as possible in the rotation to ensure improved function throughout the rotation cycle and not only at final felling. This is well in line with EU and national legislation which can be interpreted as requiring landscape planning at all forest ages to meet biodiversity and other environmental goals. However, it is still rare that planning for conservation is done other than at the final felling stage. Implementing this new strategy is likely to have long-term positive effects and improve the protection of surface waters from negative forestry effects and a history of fire suppression. By following these suggested management principles, there will be a longer time period with high function and greater future management flexibility in addition to the benefits provided by leaving riparian buffers at the final felling stage.

Governments are increasingly applying collaborative approaches even though little is known about how effectively the outputs are implemented. This empirical study used the ‘Soil and Water’ Working Group of the Dialogue for Nature Consideration in Sweden to investigate which aspects of legitimacy influence the implementation of collaborative outputs. It included document analysis, observation and 38 interviews with participants and representatives of implementing organisations. Despite being recommendations and lacking authoritative rule, the outputs from a collaborative process are implemented to a very high degree in educational and planning material all over Sweden. The forest sector’s general perception of the outputs as having high procedural, source-based and substantive legitimacy has been crucial to their extensive implementation.

This study aims at advancing collaborative governance theory by investigating the interaction between two different collaborative arrangements within the same forested area of high ecological and social value in the Vindel River basin. Semi-structured interviews, policy documents and observations of board meetings were analysed based on analytical typologies of collaborative arrangements to answer the following questions: which factors can explain why a new collaborative arrangement was established within an area where one already existed? In what way do the two arrangements compete with or complement each other? And, to what extent do they address the effects of forestry on water? The analysis shows that a new collaborative arrangement was formed because the existing arrangement did not materialise certain stakeholders' expectations. Moreover, the two collaborative arrangements do not compete but rather complement each other. The newly established organisational/action collaborative arrangement presented those stakeholders most interested in on-the-ground action with the appropriate venue while freeing them from the organisational/policy arrangement that did not match their aims. However, both arrangements experienced power misbalances as certain stakeholders were perceived as having more influence on their agenda. Collaboration at this local-regional level was found to focus on limited problems with concrete and feasible solutions, such as fish migration, rather than on the complex problems with solutions marked by ecological uncertainty and power asymmetries, e.g. diffuse pollution from forestry.