Freedom with what? Interpretations of “responsibility” in Swedish forestry practice

Erik Löfmarck, Ylva Uggla and Rolf Lidskog

Forest Policy and Economics, 2017, vol. 75, issue C, 34-40

Abstract: Responsibility is a key aspect of all regulation, and forest regulation is no exception. How should responsibility be understood and used in a time characterized by complexity and uncertainty? This paper develops a typology that distinguishes six notions of responsibility and then employs it in analyzing interpretations of responsibility in Swedish forestry practice. The Swedish forest management system is a deregulated system structured by the governing principle of “freedom with responsibility.” By investigating how responsibility is understood and enacted by forest consultants and forest owners, we demonstrate the practical fluidity of the responsibility concept. We emphasize the need for an understanding of responsibility that fosters sensitivity and adaptiveness to external issues and actors in the face of uncertainty, and identify obstacles in current forestry policy and practice to enacting such an understanding.

Keywords: Responsibility; Regulation; Norms; Forest governance; Forest policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934116304567
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:75:y:2017:i:c:p:34-40

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2016.12.004

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 ().