Conflict and legitimacy: explaining tensions in Swedish hunting policy at the local level

Abstract

This article reveals the existence of a so-called “ghost policy” (informal tradition and/or obsolete policy rules) that resists new official policy concerning the management of natural resources in Sweden. These ghost policies are often ignored in the Swedish policy making process inhibiting, therefore, viable and legitimate solutions to the profound negative consequences that costly local conflicts of interest have on democracy. These conflicts of interest expose and represent a classic and current problem intrinsic to the communitarian policy process in Sweden. That is, since the Swedish policy process has a blind spot, it focuses on the views of experts and interest organisations and, subsequently, overlooks the perceptions of those stakeholders (in this case local game hunters) affected by policy. This undermines the policy's goals since they are alien to local tradition. Furthermore, not just the existence and ubiquity of ghost policies, but even social facts such as the physical size and membership of an organisation influence conflicts of interest. This implies that there is still room for collaborations with locals as well as social engineering in the policy process. In order then for the Swedish policy process to gain more legitimacy from stakeholders involved with natural resource management the government must review and change its present processes of policy making.