Capture that Lasts: Keeping Commitments while Removing the Capacity to Reach Them. Evidence from Swedish Forest Policy.
Capture that Lasts: Keeping Commitments while Removing the Capacity to Reach Them. Evidence from Swedish Forest Policy.
This is a presentation of findings from a report for the Swedish Forest Agency on who holds political power in the forestry sector, and the the paper that follows from it. Based on 23 elite interviews with ministers, state secretaries and senior officials, a career-path network analysis of political appointees and inquiry leaders, and government documents, the authors identify the mechanisms through which production interests are reproduced across changing political arenas: mechanisms that are legal, but not necessarily legitimate.
The first case (2018–2021), the woodland key habitat inventory, concerns a commitment the Swedish state set itself and can therefore withdraw. A governing party with internally divided preferences delegates the arena to the smaller partner that cares most about it. Concessions are then paid in annual instructions to agencies (regleringsbrev), which the government decides on its own, rather than in legislation, which parliament must pass. A seat at the budget table cements the arrangement, since funding determines implementation. What is undermined is the state's capacity to monitor and support implementation. Registration of new key habitats ended in 2021 and has not resumed, and compensation funding for protection was cut by two thirds.
The second case (2022–2026) concerns commitments binding from above, which cannot be withdrawn: the EU Nature Restoration Regulation and the revised Renewable Energy Directive, both of which depend on how primary and old-growth forest are defined. Where EU law binds, Sweden's commissions of inquiry (statens offentliga utredningar) and its agencies become a steering instrument. Via appointing chairs, formulating terms of reference, and administrative decisions the government can set the size of the obligation while remaining formally in line with higher level objectives. Choosing a reference baseline for habitats, well below the environmental agency's own estimate, and a national re-definition of old-growth forest that reduces conservation requirements, shrinks the obligation from both ends. What is undermined is the state's capacity to reach its own objectives: the parameters are set to serve sectoral interests, leaving the conservation goals formally intact and ecologically unattainable.
Neither case involves illegality or private gain. The objectives stay in force and no government has to defend a reversal. What changes are the capacities and instruments that make those objectives achievable. Capacity of this kind is cheap to remove and slow to rebuild, and some of it only on biological time scales: ecologically valuable areas where felling proceeds unopposed because they had never been inventoried may require hundreds of years to recover. The effects therefore outlast the coalition that produced them. The letter of the law is kept while its objectives are undermined. These mechanisms operated in plain sight and were publicly debated, yet they ran against majority preference for expanded protection. Publicity made accountability possible and did not produce it. What accountability would have required here is the question these cases leave open.