ABSTRACT
‘The Forest Kingdom – with values for the world’ is the Swedish government’s vision for the forest sector, launched in 2011 by the ministry responsible for forest policy in Sweden. The vision has been propounded in a setting where the conventional boundaries of the forest sector are challenged, as forest issues are increasingly intertwined with global climate change and related politics, energy systems and broader land use issues (Beland Lindahl and Westholm 2010). The explicit ambition with the Forest Kingdom is to find new and innovative ways of relating to and generating income from forest resources; to stimulate entrepreneurship in rural areas, and the valuing of multiple services that forests provide. In this chapter, we explore the Forest Kingdom as a positioning of the Swedish state in an increasingly contested forest policy setting. The study is an attempt to demonstrate implicit values guiding Swedish forest policy making, enabling critical reflection on ‘the taken for granted’. We analyse the Forest Kingdom as discursive practice, i.e. as the means through which some statements but not others are made credible and consequential (Barad 2003, 818–21), and focus on the representation of two fairly new but seemingly disparate policy issues: climate change (CC) and gender equality. By analysing these two issues, we aim to contribute to a broader and deeper picture of the Forest Kingdom as a recent forest policy initiative on the one hand, and bring attention to implicit values underpinning Swedish forest governance.
