The sustainably managed forest heats up: discursive struggles over forest management and climate change in Germany

Abstract

In this article, we introduce an empirical case study of the German forest policy subsystem in order to understand how the concept of sustainable forest management has been discursively constructed, challenged, and changed over time. As a theoretical basis, we use an idea-based coalition approach, drawing on both the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Hajer's Argumentative Discourse Analysis. We show that rival coalitions that share a certain idea of forest management have dominated German forest policy for decades by employing different rhetorical and institutional strategies in order to incorporate their ideas into public policy institutions. Analyzing how the issue of climate change is discursively ‘digested’ by the actor coalitions, we find that climate change has been incorporated into the political argumentation of both coalitions in a manner consistent with their existing main policy ideas. Moreover, the membership of the coalitions has remained stable. These findings allow for conclusions regarding both our theoretical approaches and the policy subsystem's ability to adapt forests to cope with climate change.