Despite ambitious policy targets at the global and EU levels, biodiversity is under increasing threat. Ambitious policy targets have been set to halt the loss of biodiversity. Still, effective implementation depends, among other factors, on supportive behavioural responses from forest owners and managers who must respond to multiple policy and socio-economic drivers, forcing them to make decisions and trade-offs while dealing with complexity and uncertainty.

Several forest models have recently been improved in representing the behaviour and behavioural change of forest owners and managers. Building on that, the current study aimed to examine how behaviour and behavioural change can support improvements in forest biodiversity status and, more generally, in more sustainable socio-ecological forest systems, including synergies and trade-offs, by quantitatively assessing the outcomes of selected policy and management scenarios.

This study focuses on the role of external events – in the form of climate change and climate-induced disturbance – for policy forest development. The aim is to explore the evolution of European forest policy through a longitudinal analysis of Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Sweden, assessing how climate change and climate-induced disturbances are considered in policy goals, problem perceptions, governance approaches, and preferred management solutions. First, we map and analyze policy development within each country over a period of two decades. Second, we discuss how these findings relate to climate change and climate-induced disturbances. Third, and finally, we reflect on the similarities and differences of the four countries. The empirical results provide an overview of forest policy development and show how responsive the governance systems have been to the new challenges posed by a rapidly changing climate. While much stability has characterized European forest policy, revisions and substantial changes, partly motivated by increasing climate change and climate-induced disturbances, are evident in different ways and to varying degrees in the countries studied. The magnitude and consequences of these disruptive events, existing institutional structures, and present advocacy coalitions are suggested as explanations for variations among countries. The lessons about past responsiveness may predict the pace of implementation of new forest policies and adaptation to disturbances in the future.

This study explores why social movement actors employ legal tactics, focusing on 11 years of opposition to a mining project in Kallak/Gállok in northern Sweden. Previous research has highlighted contextual opportunities and constraints, resources, and traditions as explanations for the use of legal tactics. Using frame analysis, the study examines how movement actors interpret the factors that shape their tactical choices. The findings suggest that several explanations often interrelated in influencing specific choices, underscoring the importance of exploring movement actors’ motivations holistically. The movement's internal multi-organizational field emerged as a novel explanatory factor. Actors adapted to the tactics and roles of others in the movement, resulting in a division of labour where some specialized in public protest and others in legal mobilization. Future research should attend to movement actors’ situational interpretations and internal movement dynamics when seeking to understand the use of legal mobilization in social movements.

This Special Section explores the interplay between Indigenous peoples, industry, and the state in five proposed and active mining projects in Canada and Sweden. The overall aim is to identify factors shaping the quality of Indigenous community-industry-state interactions in mining and mine development. An ambition underlying the research is to develop knowledge to help manage mining related land-use conflicts in Sweden by drawing on Canadian comparisons and experience. This paper synthesizes the comparative research that has been conducted across jurisdictions in three Canadian provinces and Sweden. It focuses on the interplay between the properties of the governance system, the quality of interaction and governance outcomes. We combine institutional and interactive governance theory and use the concept of governability to assess how and why specific outcomes, such as mutually beneficial interaction, collaboration, or opposition, occurred. The analysis suggests there are measures that can be taken by the Swedish Government to improve the governability of mining related issues, by developing alternative, and more effective, avenues to recognize, and protect, Sámi rights and culture, to broaden the scope and increase the legitimacy and transparency of the EIAs, to raise the quality of interaction and consultation, and to develop tools to actively stimulate and support collaboration and partnerships on equal terms. Generally, we argue that Indigenous community responses to mining must be understood within a larger framework of Indigenous self-determination, in particular the communities’ own assessments of their opportunities to achieve their long-term objectives using alternative governing modes and types of interactions.

This paper compares how forest ecosystem service–related policies are integrated in different national European forest governance contexts. Efforts to achieve policy integration at the EU and national levels are often described in terms of limited success. Our analysis of forest, energy/bioeconomy, climate, and conservation policies suggests that notions of progress or failure merit careful assessment. Combining theories of policy integration (PI), environmental policy integration (EPI), and policy coherence, we argue that integration outcomes depend on the combined effects of the degree and nature of PI, EPI, and multilevel coherence in the context of the prevailing forest governance system. The nature of the interdependencies, specifically anticipated synergies, and the scope of FES-related climate objectives, are crucial. Realizing the range of FES-related objectives entails safeguarding objectives not synergistically aligned with economic aims. Failures to safeguard biodiversity and regulating and cultural ecosystem services in the process of integration may have far-reaching consequences.

The development of new mines forefronts the contested nature of sustainable development. Various competing pathways of sustainability underlie mining-related conflicts, often reaching beyond the local scale of contested locations. While powerful actors tend to ‘close down’ around particular pathways, ‘opening-up’ through the consideration of multiple pathways might be necessary for addressing complex situations and conflicts. Whether closing-down or opening-up occurs depends on governance structures and actors' interventions, but little is known of the dynamics involved. This paper develops understudied spatial dimensions of protest by clarifying how political opportunity structures may play out differently at different scales and in consequence impact scalar strategies of both social movements and state actors. The study comparatively analyses three mine development processes in Arctic, peripheral Sweden facing socioeconomic challenges and where mining threatens indigenous reindeer husbandry. Formal interactions are mapped by data from administrative records, while informal strategies and underlying frames are assessed through interviews and focus groups. The study shows that when there is a multiplicity of government authorities and influential mining-sceptical allies at different scales, some subnational units ‘open-up’ in response to mining-sceptical actions. Such ‘opening-up’ may influence policy decisions at higher scales, even the international. Local participation therefore constitutes a way to challenge the scalar hierarchy of the state and promote a broader and more nuanced range of pathways to sustainability. As ‘opening-up’ is not legally required, the results between the different cases differed, and where the opportunity structures were ‘closed’ mining-sceptics turned to confrontation and litigation.

This study explores factors affecting local actors' and citizens’ attitudes to mineral exploration, and how attitudes to exploration relates to those of mining. The concept Social License to Explore (SLE), originating from Social License to Operate (SLO), is used to address the relationship between exploration companies and affected local communities. The study focuses on attitudes in three municipalities in northern Sweden and Finland and combines qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show that local attitudes to mineral exploration and mining correlate strongly and are intimately linked. Perceptions of impacts, the permit process, and trust in government and company affect local attitudes, but company performance seems to be most important where trust was not established. We argue that values about nature, economy, and value-based development preferences, are central as they shape local attitudes and perceptions of impacts and process. While company conduct and community engagement are within the control of companies, local values and development preferences are largely outside of their control. However, insights about contextual conditions shaping attitudes and values can be generalized and help companies make more informed decisions. Responsible target selection is a strategy within the control of the company which can help avoid intractable and costly conflicts.