Abstract
The extent to which scientific knowledge translates into practice is a pervasive question. We analysed to what extent and how ecological scientists gave input to policy for two approaches advocated for promoting forest biodiversity in production forests in Sweden: green-tree retention (GTR) and continuous-cover forestry (CCF). GTR was introduced into forest policy in the 1970s and became widely implemented in the 1990s. Ecological scientists took part in the policy process by providing expert opinions, educational activities and as lobbyists, long before research confirming the positive effects of GTR on biodiversity was produced. In contrast, CCF was essentially banned in forest legislation in 1979. In the 1990s, policy implicitly opened up for CCF implementation, but CCF still remains largely a rare silvicultural outlier. Scientific publications addressing CCF appeared earlier than GTR studies, but with less focus on the effects on biodiversity. Ecological scientists promoted CCF in certain areas, but knowledge from other disciplines and other socio-political factors appear to have been more important than ecological arguments in the case of CCF. The wide uptake of GTR was enhanced by its consistency with the silvicultural knowledge and normative values that forest managers had adopted for almost a century, whereas CCF challenged those ideas. Public pressure and institutional requirements were also key to GTR implementation but were not in place for CCF. Thus, scientific ecological knowledge may play an important role for policy uptake and development, but knowledge from other research disciplines and socio-political factors are also important.
Highlights
The role of ecological science and the knowledge it generates in the development of environmental policy has been intensively discussed during recent decades
We addressed the complexity of the policy process by analysing how different socio-political factors, including ecological science, fed into the policy process and interacted with each other, and how this interaction shaped the uptake of scientific ecological knowledge at each distinct stage of the policy cycle
This search resulted in a sparse number of scientific publications, which were not included in our quantitative analysis of accumulated knowledge, but we addressed some of them in our qualitative assessment of the development of scientific knowledge regarding green tree retention (GTR) and continuous-cover forestry (CCF)
Summary
The role of ecological science and the knowledge it generates in the development of environmental policy has been intensively discussed during recent decades. Within environmental research there is a persistent concern that ecological knowledge is ignored in policy processes (van Kerkhoff and Lebel 2006; Nagasaka et al 2016; Pullin and Knight 2003; Salomaa et al 2016; Lawrence 2017). This concern is challenged by historical studies, which find that ecological scientists can in-fact have a strong influence on environmental policy, for example in the ‘greening’ of forest policy and management during the 1990s (Hays 2007; Wellock 2010; Simonsson et al 2014). Studies show that inclusive and deliberate policy processes can be more important for improving scientific impact, than scientific consensus (Gulbrandsen 2008). When economic or political stakes are high, scientific evidence is more likely to be contested during the policy process (Gulbrandsen 2008; cf. Jasanoff 2004)
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