“Forest property rights under attack”: Actors, networks and claims about forest ownership in the Swedish press 2014–2017

Anna Sténs and Erland Mårald

Forest Policy and Economics, 2020, vol. 111, issue C

Abstract: Sweden is a leading country in governance of property rights, according to global assessments, but Swedish landowners currently argue that their forest property rights are being eroded. Thus, the aim of this article is to investigate when and why the current debate on forest property rights came about, and its resemblance to discussion in an ‘echo-chamber’. This refers to an arena in which information is accessed from limited sources and a small number of actors with ideological homogeneity may exert substantial influence and reinforce established opinions. Hence, it may spread disinformation, increase polemic tensions, and hamper deliberative policy processes in society. We assess the resemblance by identifying where the issue is debated in printed news media, the active actors, the interests they represent and how they problematize property rights, i.e. the claims they make and the claims’ homogeneity. Our results show that the debate has intensified in recent years, but several issues are not new. The debate is mainly limited to the Swedish rural business press and rural conservative press. Moreover, the main claim-makers are representatives of land and forest owner organizations, and members of agrarian and conservative political parties, which have close organizational and individual connections, thereby forming a metaphorical ‘chamber’. The ‘echo’ consists of repetitive claims about withdrawal and management rights, with no efforts to examine and contextualize complex aspects of private property rights in a changing society. The debate about forest ownership in an echo-chamber is problematic in several ways. It hampers efforts of claim-makers in the chamber to reach out, undermines current systems’ legitimacy, and locks important questions about sustainable forestry and property rights into a narrow societal sphere.

Keywords: Forestry; Conservation policy; Echo-chamber; Forest property rights; Printed press (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934118304775
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:111:y:2020:i:c:s1389934118304775

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2019.102038

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().