| Summary: | During the last decades natural resource management in general and forest management in particular have changed. In the past forests were managed for a single commodity and for the general public, but lately more and more emphasis has been put on the multi-functionality of forests. Thus it has been recognized that multiple interests are connected to forests and that the general public in fact consists of a variety of stakeholders. The interests connected to forests are often incompatible and sometimes conflicts arise over them. Participation, the involvement of stakeholders into a decision-making process, has been suggested to be a suitable approach to manage multiple interests and to avoid the escalation of conflicts in many cases. The changing of natural resource management has manifested itself in international forest policy in which participation has received considerable attention. Also in Sweden forest management has changed over the past decades; in the 1980s and 1990s conservation issues became incorporated in forest management and recently also social values have become a part of the objectives of Swedish forest policy. Participation also has gained importance; in 2005 Sweden ratified the Århus Convention in which participation has a central place. Participation may be an approach to deals with the multiple interest and the returning conflicts in the mountainous forest regions. The regions have been inhabited by the Sámi since ancient times. These indigenous people have the ancient right to live on these lands and herd their reindeer. Besides multiple interests there thus also exists a dilemma of overlapping rights. The objective of this study was to to implement a stakeholder and interest analysis, and on the basis of it acquire knowledge about participation in forest management in the mountainous forest regions of Sweden. A case study was executed around the planning of clear-cuts in a 500 ha mountain forest in Swedish Lapland (Stöken). Multiple rights, interests and stakeholders are connected to the ...
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