Abstract
Sweden’s mountain areas are sensitive ecosystems that are used by a wide range of stakeholders, and this raises multiple sustainability concerns. Collaborative governance solutions are becoming increasingly common in such situations to promote more sustainable practices. While the Swedish mountain area is indeed a hot spot for different forms of public–private partnerships (PPPs) related to natural resources management, as yet, little is known about the shaping of participation, leadership, and implementation of these processes. What are the drivers for implementing collaborative environmental partnerships, do the drivers differ, and if so, how? What role does the specific context play in the design of these PPPs? Are the PPPs useful, and if so, for what? To analyze those issues, we conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with project leaders from a sample randomly selected from a database of 245 public–private collaborative projects in the Swedish mountains. Our results indicate that consequential incentives in the form of funding and previous successful collaborations seem to be the major drivers for such partnerships. A critical discussion of the possibilities and limitations of public–private forms of governance in rural mountain areas adds to the ongoing debate on the performance of environmental PPPs in a regional context.
Highlights
The Swedish mountain region is currently experiencing a high development pressure, which is threatening sensitive environments that are of interest for different land uses [1,2,3]
The aim of this paper is to examine the shaping of participation, leadership, and the implementation of partnering processes on natural resource management, i.e., the realisation of these environmental private partnerships (PPPs) in the Swedish mountain region
The results presented are relevant to other countries and/or regions with similar socio-economic contexts, i.e., sparsely populated areas rich in natural resources that wish to manage the sustainability of their natural resources through PPPs
Summary
The Swedish mountain region is currently experiencing a high development pressure, which is threatening sensitive environments that are of interest for different land uses [1,2,3]. The realization of the Swedish National Environmental Quality Objectives (NEQO) of “a magnificent mountain environment”, “flourishing lakes and streams”, “sustainable forests”, and “a rich diversity of plant and animal life” are at stake, and it is acknowledged that reaching the NEQOs will require considerable added efforts from a variety of social, political, and economic actors Both in Sweden and internationally, various forms of collaborative governance are seen as promising ways to deal with “wicked problems” and policy failure, including the pooling of resources among multiple stakeholders and the use of deliberative management practices e.g., [4,5,6,7]. The Swedish Government’s Nature Protection Policy from 2001 reiterates the need to widen the scope and engage a broader range of actors, including local communities to achieve policy goals, in the form of public–private partnerships, and similar policies have been adopted in the forest, rural development, and water management sectors [8,9,10,11]
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