Constructing forest owner identities and governing decisions and relationships: the owner as distant consumer in Swedish forestry

Abstract

Increasing diversification, urbanization, economic restructuring, and distances, as well as declining economic dependence on forestry, are changing the characteristics of forest ownership and the conditions for environmental governance. Through an interview-based case study of Swedish forestry industrial actors, this article examined the organizational and governing aspects and implications of recent shifts by exploring the strategies and marketing/governing technologies of private/industrial forestry organizations. With a focus on local implementation, this study shows that forest owners are largely constructed, and engaged, as consumers (rather than, for example, as timber suppliers) and are governed, partly at a distance, through specific forms of guidance, technologies, and knowledge to overcome the lack of social and physical presence in the design and interaction of sale. This stresses the need to understand the role, function, and power of the forestry organizations and sales processes in research on environmental and forest policy implementation on multiple levels.