Democracy and Sustainable Development in wildlife management:

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Democracy and Sustainable

Development in wildlife management:

From ‘stakeholders’ to ‘citizens’ in the Swedish wolf

restoration process

Master thesis in Sustainable Development

Erica von Essen

Department of Earth Sciences

Uppsala University

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Democracy

and

Sustainable

Development

in

wildlife

management: from ‘stakeholders’ to ‘citizens’ in the Swedish

wolf restoration process

ERICA VON ESSEN

von Essen, Erica, 2012: Democracy and Sustainable Development in Wildlife Management: from ‘stakeholders’ to ‘citizens’ in the Swedish wolf restoration process. Master thesis in Sustainable

Development at Uppsala University, pp. 54. 30 ECTS/hp

Abstract:

In an attempt to lend legitimacy to the troubled wolf project and to root policies in wolf-affected counties, decision-making was decentralized to stakeholder-based county wildlife management delegations in Sweden in 2009. Drawing from Habermas’ critical theory, this paper suggests that a phenomenon of instrumental rationality is currently circumscribing free and open deliberation in these delegations. Consequently, stakeholders remain fixed in their predetermined positions as wolf-skeptic hunters or pro-wolf conservationists, unable to be swayed by the deliberative process.

The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers to deliberation that account for the perseverance of this strategic stakeholder rationality. Three county wildlife delegations are investigated as examples of this. The paper identifies the following four barriers, which are traced to instrumentality: strong sense of accountability, overly purposive atmosphere, overemphasis on decision as final outcome and perceived inability on the part of the delegates to influence decision-making, which is found by and large to still be ruled by scientists.

Through these findings, it suggests that such barriers cause delegates to censor their own discursive attempts and to act with strategic rather than with communicative rationality toward the decision-making process. Finally, the paper concludes that the effect of instrumentality in these delegations is currently leading to (1) a crisis of legitimacy for the wolf project, as according to Habermas’ theory and (2) reduced individual freedom under the pursuit of sustainable development, as freedom has been confined to the dimension of the protection and promotion of private interests.

Keywords: Sustainable Development, wildlife management, deliberative democracy, stakeholder,

strategic rationality, environmental communication

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Popular summary

When wolf governance was revamped to include the local population, many thought that it would help the troubled Swedish wolf conservation gain acceptance. But the problem with the local delegations is that the stakeholder participants who try to work out decisions stay locked in their predetermined roles and consequently cannot agree on anything.

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Glossary of key terms

Colonization of the life-world – when the system infringes upon communicatively-integrated contexts in such a way as to subject them to rationalization and mediatization. Communicative rationality – disposition toward reaching a mutual understanding through intersubjective, linguistic communication

Deliberative democracy – form of democracy in which the weighing of options through reasoned argumentation and logic is central, as opposed to a power-struggle.

Instrumentality – orientation toward goal attainment by most efficient course of action; non-social in contrast to strategic rationality.

Intersubjective – social interaction between people

Life-world – “Lebenswelt”, the lived realm of culturally-grounded values and understandings that develop through intersubjective communication.

Mediatization – the emergence of non-communicative means of structuring interactions in such a way as to achieve ends. Media include money, power, influence and commitments. Modernization – according to critical theory, process linked to the increasing rationalization of society.

Rationalization – submission of contexts of public life to the logic of efficiency and control. Sovereign – the collective autonomy of citizens.

Strategic rationality – disposition toward seeking personal goal attainment in social contexts.

System – set of specialized, differentiated structures and institutions governed by bureaucracy, cognitive-instrumental rationality and non-communicative media.

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1. Introduction

s per the recent stakeholder involvement approach to democracy, a stakeholder in environmental conflicts refers to a person, group or organization that stands to gain or lose from decisions taken in management. In the ongoing wolf restoration conflict in Sweden, stakeholders represent such interests as transhumance agriculture, hunting and wildlife conservation, which are now given voice through delegates in new county wildlife management delegations (viltförvaltningsdelegationer). Moreover, the ‘stakeholder’ way of approaching democracy in environmental decision-making means placing people in narrow and predetermined categories and ascribing them with fixed interests. It is characteristic of the instrumentality of the modern epoch, in which participatory efforts are geared toward outcome rather than the communicative process. Consequently, actors involved in wolf conservation are locked in set roles and strategic rationality prevails in the delegation forum.

As a consequence of this, the stakeholder way to governance is currently reproducing a polarization of attitudes toward the wolf among actors involved and citizens at large. It is also resulting in fewer emergent solutions and visions from the county delegations and an impaired legitimacy of wolf management in Sweden. The ‘wolf war’ is in this way leading to a broader mistrust of authority over one’s stake being ignored. The government is increasingly seen as incompetent, unjust and illegitimate (Habermas, 1987; Ingram, 2010, p. 271-272). Citizens not only lose respect for the government, but also for each other as society become increasingly anomic. Finally, with a perceived inability to make a difference, the stakeholder model fails to instill the proper motivation in citizens to participate at all (ibid).

If we connect this failure of participation in wolf conservation to sustainable development, we can demarcate an ethical dimension of sustainability that harbors a vision for the future that includes equality, justice and freedom. Chapter two of Agenda 21 (1992), the UN action plan for sustainable development, built on pre-existing ideals of participation and forged an important conceptual link between democracy and sustainability. To this paper, therefore, sustainable development is seen not as an outcome but as a process that is based on democratic dialogue on environmental issues, which individuals participate in on free terms. This formulation of sustainability is based on the ideas of Hansen and Caselunghe (2012). What the severity of the wolf situation further demonstrates is that democracy in itself is not always enough. Furthermore, Rousseau famously posited that freedom is contingent upon the opportunity to deliberate freely as citizens in forums. Habermas takes an institutionalist view in arguing that ordinary citizens have the ability to deliberate and that only with such open communicative action may legitimacy be attained, but that structural features of the system prevents them from exercising this ability. Moreover, current democratic process of wolf governance, which in 2009 was envisioned as a solution to the wolf conflict, is vertically structured and aggregative, with predetermined stakeholder roles and strategic rationality. Seen in this way, it presents a challenge to a sustainable future with the wolf in Sweden. Thus, drawing from the ideas of Rousseau and Habermas, there is a need to move away from this instrumental process toward the active and meaningful engagement of citizens

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rather than stakeholders in what is termed deliberative democracy. Here participants are stripped of instrumentality and rendered equal and free, which allows reasoned argumentation to prevail by way of open social dialogue. Benhabib (1996) asserts of deliberative democracy:

“[…] it is a necessary condition for attaining legitimacy and rationality with regard to collective decision-making process in a polity, that the institutions in this polity are so arranged that what is considered the common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals.” (Benhabib, 1996, p. 69)

Achieving deliberative dialogue in the county delegations can help solve the problem of bounded rationality in the wolf conflict, by recognizing the fluidity of interests. Stakeholders may widen their limited perspectives and gain sympathy for opposing views. The promise of deliberative democracy is thereby to help fulfill the freedom criteria of a sustainable development and to begin to fully legitimize the wolf project and settle the political instability that currently shrouds Swedish wildlife management. Finally, such deliberation among interest groups also offers the possibility of the emergence of new knowledge from diverse perspectives and more successful and long-term wolf conservation policies (based on the ideas of ‘addity’ and ‘emergence’, see Smith, 2003). However, getting stakeholders to submerge their self-interested, self-protective maneuvering in the forum to emerge as citizens in this way is presently fraught with structural and communicative difficulties.

1.2. Problem formulation & aim

With these difficulties in mind, the aim of this paper is to determine the reasons for why interest groups persevere as stakeholders rather than emerge as citizens in the new county wildlife management delegations in the wolf conflict. It poses as its main research question:

(1) What are the structural barriers to communicative rationality in this political setting?

The assumption behind this is that structural constraints to deliberative dialogue and to communicative action will incite strategic rationality on the part of the delegates. This in turn will further circumscribe deliberation. The paper poses as its secondary research question:

(2) What are the cause(s) and effect(s) of this rationality phenomenon?

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social evolution that systematically restricts opportunity for real communicative action by way of rationalization and, in doing so, constitutes a crisis of legitimacy for society.

Boundaries to the research question have been set so as to focus on the constraints to deliberation that fall under this instrumentality theme. What must also be stated is that this paper is normative in that it operates with the idea that the deliberative process should serve as a horizontal complement to the vertical aggregative orientation of the political process in order to furnish the wolf restoration project with legitimacy. This view of deliberation as a desirable ingredient to the decision-making process rather than as a self-contained model of democracy is taken by many theorists (see, for example, Saward, 2000, p. 68). This is so because it is difficult to conceptualize governance operating without verticality; at the end of the day, a decision needs to be made and votes need to be aggregated.

The second thing to state is that when this paper refers broadly to legitimacy, it presupposes an understanding of legitimacy on three different levels. This includes the instrumental legitimacy required to lend authority to wolf policy, but also democratic legitimacy as understood from the perspective of affected citizens. Finally it includes a more theoretical understanding of legitimacy as something that is furnished by communicative action, which will be discussed shortly when we introduce Habermas’ theory of communicative action.

Against this problem formulation, the paper begins with a method chapter and, second, a theoretical chapter. Following these, the case study of the Swedish wolf restoration project will be explored in two consecutive chapters, with the first of these chapters outlining the content of the conflict and the second chapter summarizing the democratic structure of the new regionalized wolf management. Chapter six then presents empirical findings from three county wildlife management delegations. The barriers that have been identified here are subsequently subject to analysis in chapter seven, which asks among other things how strategic rationality is born and reproduced by way of these structural constraints.

The paper’s final chapter concludes the rationality problematic by envisioning a shift from ‘stakeholders’ to ‘citizens’ in the wolf war. This formulation of the rationality problematic in public participation was born from my supervisor Hans Peter Hansen’s ideas. It can be found, for example, in his contribution to the article “A Lesson Learned from Modern Nature Conservation” in the book A New Agenda for Sustainability (2010).

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2. Method

he primary method of inquiry selected for this paper is an empirical case study of the experiences and communication practice of stakeholders in three county wildlife management delegations. The details of the data collection for this case study will be offered below in section 2.2. As theoretical framework, literature on theories of communication and of deliberative democracy is applied to the findings of the case study. The selection of relevant literature is elaborated below in section 2.1. Finally, a glossary of key terms used can be found and consulted at the beginning of this paper.

2.1. Literature

The paper begins by considering Rousseau’s classic work The Social Contract (1762), which stresses the importance of citizen participation on a fundamental level of freedom and justice. However, since modern society has reduced the emphasis on direct citizen participation in governance, a more contemporary take on democracy in terms of its dimensions of freedom has been included as a complement. This will further elucidate the connection of freedom and deliberative democracy to sustainable development. The selected work is Deliberative Freedom: Deliberative Democracy as Critical Theory (2008) by Christian F. Rostbøll.

The paper then consults the branch of critical theory that considers the effect of modernity’s rationalization on communication in society, found originally in Jürgen Habermas’ two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). This is further expounded upon and made relevant in matters of environmental policy-making by Bo Elling in Rationality and the Environment: Decision-making in Environmental Politics and Assessment (2008).

The theories advanced by the abovementioned works are applied to a selected case study of the Swedish wolf conservation process, which has been my research area for the past two years. For one chapter of the paper, the content and current arena of the conflict and the stakeholder interests that receive mandate in the delegations are briefly outlined so as to illustrate the urgency of resolving the ‘wolf war’ that reigns in Sweden. The chapter ends by declaring that the wolf project at large suffers a crisis of legitimacy on three levels.

The new regionalized wildlife governance model that endeavored to legitimize wolf policy has only been subject to a handful of academic studies in the past three years, chiefly conducted in the field of political science. This paper will refer to four of these in the analysis chapter in order to ascertain if the barriers to communicative rationality were identified in other recent studies. These are (1) Oscar Funnemark's (2010) master thesis on the governance structure of the new regionalized wildlife management, (2) Petra Salenvall’s (2011) bachelor thesis on the democratic legitimacy of this new management, (3) Jenni Bergliv’s (2011) bachelor thesis evaluating the democratic preconditions of the system and finally, (4) Emil Johansson’s (2011) bachelor thesis evaluating co-management and democracy in three county delegations. These four papers are all broadly concerned with the democratic legitimacy of the new regionalized governance approach.

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2.2. Collection of empirical material

The empirical research component to this paper’s method of inquiry takes the form of a qualitative investigation of delegates’ experience of the forum practice of three wildlife management delegations. These are termed delegations A, B and C for confidentiality reasons. Access to delegation A was obtained through my work as a secretary at a Communicative Support for Predator Management course workshop in the autumn of 2011, while the B and C delegation workshops both took place within a few months of this date. As such, the method employed to this empirical investigation is largely a form of participant observation, which affords a more undistorted view of communication practice.

The context of the collection of this empirical material was a two-day workshop that was organized in conjunction with a decision meeting in which the delegations endeavored to reach consensus on areas where the wolf could be planted in their counties in 2012. It can be noted here that in delegation A, they were not successful in determining these areas. The predator management workshop was part of a joint Swedish Agricultural University (SLU) and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) program aimed at improving the dialogue among those working with the management of wildlife, including agencies such as the SEPA and the county wildlife management delegations that form the subject of this paper. The program was headed by Lars Hallgren and Lotten Westberg from the Environmental Communication division of the Swedish Agricultural University. For delegation B and C, the same workshops ran in conjunction with the same decision meetings, but Alexandra Berggren (also of SLU) and Lotten Westberg took notes of communication in my place, which are used with permission in this paper.

There are three points that must be laid forward as to the validity of the empirical material. First, access for outsiders to the actual decision meeting on the second day was not permitted. For this reason, the case study is deprived of an observation of the natural working order of the delegations, and must consequently make do with observations of communication practice among the delegates in workshop sessions before and after this meeting. It must thereby also rely on the delegates’ own reflections of what had transpired in the meeting, and how they generally perceived the working order in their delegation. For the latter, then, it came to rely on informants. Further, since these informants reflected openly in plenary as opposed to privately through surveys or interviews, a limitation could be in that they were not as open to sharing with their colleagues and county heads present.

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advanced here will be distilled from the bulk of the material from the workshops. For confidentiality reasons, the workshop notes are omitted from this paper.

Third, according to methodological theory (see for example, Yin, 2007), considering only three cases reduces the capacity of this study to generalize its findings. It is true that collecting experiences from several more delegations would strengthen the main arguments of this paper. It would likely also reveal more structural barriers to communicative rationality than what was identified by this study. However, participation in a number of delegations sufficient to constitute a statistical basis was deemed to be an unfeasible option. This was in part due to time constraints (with the program at its end by the time I came onboard). It was also due to the fact that pursuing such a survey approach would likely miss the important communicative details of the delegations, of which the more qualitative, immersive participant observation approach chosen here affords the more complete picture. Thus, I propose that the empirical material is better understood as a three-bit case study providing some examples of the rationality problematic rather than an investigation into the working order of all twenty-one wildlife management delegations. At present, it cannot claim that the barriers identified apply for all delegations, only that they may for some.

The qualitative findings from the delegations are greatly valuable as they serve to highlight the limitations of strategic rationality in reaching a mutual understanding among participants in the forum. This comes through in the notes both from the delegates’ reflections on the typical working process of the delegation and from the interaction between them that was directly observable during the course workshops. Together the findings from the three county delegations will help this paper illustrate instances of strategic rationality among participants and the structural barriers to deliberative dialogue that underlie such strategic action.

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3. Theoretical framework

This chapter provides the theory to frame the findings in this paper. It is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with participatory democracy and briefly presents two overarching problems of the vertical model of democracy, which are the presence of conflicting wills and a reduced conception of freedom. The second part outlines Habermas’ theory of communicative action in the modern era. This section argues that the cognitive-instrumental rationality of modernization is infringing upon opportunities for deliberation.

here is a wealth of theories of participatory democracy that both offer a normative direction for citizen governance and criticize aggregative stakeholder-based models like that of the county wildlife management delegations. This means that the theoretical scope for this paper is limited to (1) a formulation of democracy in terms of freedom, to which the normative commitment of this paper’s thesis adheres, and (2) a Habermasian understanding of deliberative democracy and the crisis of legitimacy that ensues from its marginalization.

For (1), we first require a classical theory of democracy that links individual freedom to participation and from which the origin calls for deliberative dialogue can be heard. Thus, the broader elements of Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) will be presented below. In the same section, the arguments raised by Christian F. Rostbøll in Deliberative Freedom: Deliberative Democracy as Critical Theory (2008) will be offered. Here will emerge that the traditional, reductionist definition of freedom that accompanies aggregative practices such as current stakeholder model contrasts that of Rousseau’s normative theory and the conception(s) of freedom associated with the deliberative democracy.

3.1. Rousseau and freedom from popular sovereignty

In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau imparts that true freedom, justice and equality can come only from full participation of the entire democratic body in matters of governance. Free of any laws and man will enslave himself to his instincts; by obeying the laws laid out for him by others he will enslave himself to an outside force. True freedom is thus achieved only through observing the laws of one’s own making. Rousseau further argues that the sovereign (public autonomy or the collective of citizens) cannot be represented in a vertical model of democracy akin to our stakeholder model; to elect representatives is to value comfort over freedom. It is at this point that the state begins to dissolve because the survival of the sovereign is contingent upon the commitment to partake of each citizen in society.

Of relevance to this paper is Rousseau’s note on the presence of conflicting wills in the political forum and in society. To him, the ideal is unanimity in the sovereign. In a healthy state, citizens will submerge their individual interests to the common good. In the socialization process that comes from participating, citizens gradually learn to deliberate according to his sense of justice and he learns to distinguish between his own will and the common good. In an unhealthy state, the common good is subordinated to personal wills as citizens disregard their civic responsibility. Finally, civil servants, or magistrates as Rousseau terms them, have to exercise three kinds of wills: (1) an individual will that pursues a private

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interest, (2) the corporate will or the interest of the government and (3) the general will that expresses the common good of people. This is symptomatic of the friction that occurs between the sovereign and the system, which will seek to act on his own behalf.

3.1. Rostbøll and the negative freedom tradition of stakeholder

democracy

Deliberative democracy can be traced in part to Rousseau’s tradition, as Rousseau closely links freedom to our ability as humans to deliberate. Deliberative democracy is also sometimes seen as a throwback to direct democracy before the representative model started dominating (Elster, 1998; Johansson, 2011, p. 12). However, because Rousseau’s theory is strongly normative and incongruent with modern democratic systems, it is useful to present here a contemporary update to the freedom-deliberative democracy link. Thus, the main argument advanced by Rostbøll in Deliberative Freedom: Deliberative Democracy as Critical Theory (2008) is that deliberative democracy presupposes and expresses a multidimensional conception of freedom. Namely, the book connects the dimensions of negative freedom, public autonomy, freedom as status and freedom as autonomous opinion-forming to deliberative democracy. There is no space to relay all of these in this paper.

Rather, Rostbøll’s crucial point that I draw from is that the aggregative stakeholder model of democracy adheres to a one-dimensional concept of freedom. This is a conception of negative freedom. Connected to the broader concept of negative liberty, negative freedom is often traced to Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and it is defined as “the absence of external obstruction to or interference with motion of activity” (Rostbøll, 2008, p. 34). Framed in an understanding of democracy, then, negative freedom means the non-interference of the individual participants’ private interests. We are now a long way from the sovereignty envisioned by Rousseau, as sovereignty under this conception of freedom means, simply, that the participant seeks to: (1) protect his own interests and (2) have them count in the aggregative process of decision-making. Moreover, to James Mill, participation is largely seen as a cost incurred to the individual for instrumental reasons to protect and to promote his preferences and desires (ibid, p. 43). Furthermore, since preferences are seen as products of freedom under this liberal democratic tradition, it is considered a violation of one’s freedom to criticize them (ibid, p. 115). Political interaction thus takes on negative connotations of interference with something that should be ‘off-limits’ to politics.

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(ibid, p. 39). What follows is a view of preferences as apolitical and privately determined, and not the result of a public process, highlighting a clear departure from deliberative democracy.

The contributions of Rousseau and Rostbøll that will serve as guiding thread for this paper are their combined assertions that: (1) we are not merely free in the absence of interference with our private interests and consequently that (2) the stakeholder model cannot provide us with true freedom in its multidimensional form, and (3) participants need to submerge personal stakes in the forum in order for deliberation to succeed and for the system to attain legitimacy. While critics may posit that the contemporary democratic system survives in spite of not meeting such rigid requirements as laid out by Rousseau (see, for example, a discussion on modern democracy theory advocated by Sartoli or Berelson in Participation and Democratic Theory, 1970, by Carole Pateman), the sub-system of wolf and predator conservation, on shakier grounds from the start, may not survive for long in its present form. At the very least, it is lacking in legitimacy on several different levels. This brings us to the second and concluding section in this chapter, where Habermas’ theory of communicative action will be relayed to illustrate the connection between forms rationality and legitimacy.

3.2. Habermas and the theory of communicative action

Through Legitimation Crisis (1975) and The Theory of Communicative Action I & II (1981) among several of his writings on the subject (see, for example, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) for his earliest work on the subject), Habermas contributes much to an understanding of the importance of deliberative democracy in the public sphere. Crucial to his theory of communicative action is a two-fold uncoupling of society in the form of the life-world (comprised of values and understandings that develop as a result of sustained intersubjective communication) and the system (comprised of structures and institutions). The latter has only one kind of rationality, a cognitive-instrumental one.

Through his critical theory, Habermas declares that under modernity the cognitive-instrumental rationality of the system is encroaching upon the life-world. Modernity according to Bo Elling is “a result of societal evolution with advancing rationalization” (Elling, 2008, p.79). Moreover, what we are seeing is a differentiation between action oriented toward mutual understanding, which takes place in the horizon of the life-world, and action oriented toward outcome (Habermas, 1984, p. 86). These two dispositions are denoted by communicative and strategic or instrumental rationality, key terms to this paper. In the latter, action is transferred from language and intersubjective reason to what Habermas calls steering media (money, power, influence etc.), which makes it possible to condense or completely bypass consensus-oriented communication.

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qualitative intersubjective communication, the life-world becomes devalued and made provincial. With the uncoupling of the system and the life-world, modernity splits into different forms of knowledge (e.g. science and morality) that arrive at different truths and validity claims. Political and moral questions on sustainability are turned into issues to be managed scientifically and economically by technocrats. Instrumental thinking thus dominates, whereby the course of action that will most optimally achieve desired ends will be taken, with the ends predetermined by scientific authority and not up for public deliberation. The crucial point of this encroachment is that because the life-world (with its communicative rationality) is the only thing that may furnish legitimacy, the system that is infringing upon its domain is still dependent on it. Hence, we are faced with a crisis of legitimacy.

Serving as markers of failing deliberation are strategic action on the part of participants to maneuver and manipulate and instrumental rationality on the part of the institutions (which for our purposes correspond to the county board, the SEPA and the Swedish government) to maintain this current system. It is possible, therefore, to discern a link between Habermas’ and Rostbøll’s observations of the broad idea of instrumentality impairing communicative rationality. Habermas views this phenomenon in terms of the waning legitimacy of society, while Rostbøll understands it in terms of reducing freedom for citizens. Further, Habermas espouses the ideal set forth by Rousseau and emphasized by Rostbøll by arguing that freedom in his normative commitment to deliberative democracy is achieved only insofar as citizens observe just those laws that they themselves are authors of, and in accordance with insights that have been obtained intersubjectively (Habermas, 1996, p. 445-446).

The benefit to using Habermas’ theory is that the stakeholder and citizen positions for our purposes elucidate strategic and communicative rationality respectively. Through this rationality problematic, we are able to move beyond the forum in connecting delegates’ actions and reflections to a broader critique of modernization that identifies both causes (rationalization) and effects (legitimatization crisis) of the stakeholder phenomenon. Finally, Habermas posits that the legitimization crisis is not readable to the individual but visible only through analysis. We can therefore identify another possible contribution of this paper, apart from criticizing stakeholder governance, in its rendering an invisible process visible.

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4. The Swedish wolf conservation conflict

This chapter introduces the content of the present wolf conservation conflict in Sweden, including a brief historic background to the problem and the current ecological and legal state of the wolf. In the second part of the chapter, the arena for the conflict and the stakeholder interests that receive mandate in the county wildlife management delegates are briefly summarized. It concludes by addressing the impaired legitimacy of the entire project.

4.1. The current state of the wolf

rom a peak wolf population of around 1,500 individuals in Sweden the 19th century, human persecution drastically reduced its numbers until the estimate that there were no more than ten wolves left in the county in the 1960s (Rovdjurscentret, 2012). At this point, the traditional bounty on the wolf was hastily removed and it was granted protective status in Sweden. A decade later, restorative measures were being discussed against the background of Swedish citizens adapting their lifestyles and livelihoods to an essentially wolf-free existence in the countryside. Meanwhile three wolves from Karelia made their way to the county of Värmland in the 1980’s and started reproducing a new ‘Swedish’ wolf population.

Significantly, all wolves in Sweden and Norway today, which share their population (with the majority of wolves on the Swedish side), are held to be related to these three individual wolves. According to SKANDULV, the joint Scandinavian wolf research team, this level of genetic inbreeding is higher than would be in the offspring produced by a sibling pair. This state is exacerbated by the fact that there is an 800 kilometer stretch in northern Sweden where wolf presence is not permitted due to the reindeer husbandry of the indigenous Sami, which is seen as incompatible with increasing carnivores. This obstruction to genetic exchange with the Finnish-Russian gene pool is currently the source of political tension. Due to the aforementioned state of genetic isolation, the Swedish wolf population is internationally held as unviable. The EC Habitats Directive (92/43/EEG)was stipulated by the EU in 1992 and includes goals of Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) for select species, including the wolf in Sweden. These areas go on to comprise the broader vision of EU’s Natura 2000 project, which is envisioned to create an interrelated network or ‘mosaic’ of conservation territories across the European Union. Although since 2004 a Least Concern species globally (and cannot therefore be construed as a biodiversity project), the direction laid down by the EU is that the wolf in Sweden should obtain a favorable conservation status. The objective of favorable conservation status is not clarified on the EU level in terms of criteria for the level of inbreeding, goal range or pack distribution, but is largely left at the discretion of the national government to determine with the help of ecological assessments by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). The regional reality of this is then addressed in the county wildlife management delegations. The details and function of this political setting will be offered in chapter six. The Riksdag formally implemented the politics of the Habitats Directive in March 2001 (prop. 2000/01:57, bet. 2000/01: MJU9, rskr 2000/01:174). If the Swedish government should fail in implementing the goals of the

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directive, the EU commission has mandate to issue a warning. This happened in 2011 over the licensed culling of a wolf population that was deemed too low by the EU.

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) currently estimates that the wolf population is at around 300 individual wolves between Sweden and Norway. This number is however currently highly contested between different interest groups. Further, because of the lack of criteria provided by the EU, what actually constitutes favorable conservation status of the Swedish wolf represents a point of major contention. Even within the scientific community there are multipe interpretations. On the level of society, there is a range of estimates all supposedly derived using scientific criteria, with conservationist institutions like Artdatabanken putting this level at 1200-2100 wolves (Artdatabanken, 2007) while experts from the Swedish Hunting Society (SJF) arrive at the upper limit of 150 wolves to obtain this same status (Svenska Jägareförbundet, 2011). The political goal that is being discussed as of April 2012 is 450 wolves for a favorable status (SOU 2012:22). What is also frequently contested is how to best achieve this status; either you add two genetically unrelated wolves (taken from the Finnish-Russian pool) to the Swedish population every five years or you allow the population to increase up to higher levels on its own, at which point the deleterious effects of genetic inbreeding will be gradually eliminated (SKANDULV, 2010).

4.2. Arena for the conflict

The Special Areas of Conservation for the wolf in Sweden demonstrate that in terms of human contact with the wolf, the arena for the conflict can be termed “wildland, not wilderness” (Walker, 2002). With this is meant that the physical dimensions of wolf conservation are of a scattered, mosaic-like character, with rural residents living, hunting, engaging in recreational activity and practicing small-scale farming across Sweden in known wolf territories. The result is a comparatively large contact-area for conflict. This is an important point to make early in this paper, as having such big political problems with a wolf population just shy of a reported 300 individuals (compared to the thousands in North America or Russia) often elicits raised eyebrows among people outside of Sweden.

Moreover, much ink has been spilt over the discontentment over the detrimental impact of the wolf on hunting and farming livelihoods and rural lifestyles over the past ten years or so, with threats to private property and security claims at the forefront. As we will see presently, there are limited opportunities to discuss and vent over such issues in the public sphere. Hence, the attitudes of the interests groups involved in the wolf conflict can be heard in newspaper articles, in hunting and kennel organizations, on online forums, blogs, facebook pages, and in the local shop or hair salon of smaller rural towns. Wolf skeptics refer to urban-dwelling ‘vargkramare’ (“wolf huggers”) and wolf proponents refer to backward rural ‘varghatare’ (“wolf haters”), thereby delimiting two static categories of people with predetermined wolf attitudes (see the terms used in, for example, Vargen: kramdjur och hatobjekt, 2011, by anthropologists Herlitz & Peterson).

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has happened before, and takes on the form of refusing to track traffic-injured wildlife, a practice that is otherwise based on the voluntary good will of hunters (Olsson, SJF, 2012). Moreover, feelings of marginalization are expressed over the fact that the initiative to embark on the wolf restoration program, issued at the top EU level with the Habitats Directive (1992), has been disconnected from the residents in the wolf regions whose stakes suffer from such a predator policy. As part of this disillusionment among citizens, there is declining trust in government officials and in the political authority at large (Moilanen, jaktojägare, 2011).

Even more severely, citizens experience that the wolf project is lacking in transparency. Suspicions of unreported wolf additions from top secret breeding programs and governmental cover-ups of wolf reports and the true origin of the two wolves that were observed in Värmland in the 1980s have also been voiced by the more radical wolf-skeptics (Sjölander-Lindvist, 2008, p. 86). Radical wolf proponents are likewise mobilizing into organizations modeled after Anti-Poaching Units popular elsewhere in the world. Together citizens patrol predator regions to protect wolves from illegal hunting, traps and acts of suspected poisoning by disgruntled hunters and other wolf-skeptics. This act of taking matters into their own hands sends a clear and undisputable message that conservationists, too, are unhappy with the way in which the authority operates. Conservationist activists have reported fearing for their safety and avoiding visiting certain wolf-dense, anti-wolf rural regions like Värmland (Sjölander-Lindqvist, 2009). Personal threats to outspoken individuals on both sides are not uncommon today. The conflict over the wolf has thus reached a national as well as local level in Sweden, and can in broad terms be said to be polarizing the rural and urban communities (see Karlsson and Sjöström’s 2007 study which corroborates this by demonstrating that distance to the nearest wolf territory is positively correlated with positive attitude toward wolves).

4.3. Stakeholder interests in the conflict

Among vocal wolf-skeptic players in the abovementioned arena for the conflict are hunters, small-scale farmers and Sami reindeer herders. The hunting interest, which receives one mandate in the county delegation (with a representative from Swedish Hunting Society or the National Hunters Association), is held to be under threat from the increasing competition for game following the wolf’s recovery (vargfakta, 2011). It has moreover transgressed beyond a hobby to a lifestyle for some 300,000 Swedes today, whose cultural connotations are perceived to be marginalized under the current wolf policy (Sjölander-Lindqvist, 2008, p. 82).

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presence of wolf still threatens to spoil careful Sami breeding plans and endanger the whole enterprise (Beach, p. 121, 2004). The political situation with the Sami is presently delicate because of fear of violating the UN declaration of Indigenous Rights. For this reason, the herding interest officially receives two mandates in the delegation, one from a representative of the Sameting and one from a representative of the Swedish Sami Association.

Finally, the ‘pro-wolf’ interest group cannot reasonably be construed as a homogeneous group of people, but is nevertheless often conceptualized as animal rights activists and conservationist organizations. Adherents to the Swedish wolf can cite its instrumental-ecological value for future generations (for example, predation on the booming wild boar populations in Sweden), or they can cite its intrinsic value, whereupon its conservation becomes a moral issue with connotations of restorative justice. The nature conservation interest receives two mandates in the delegation, furnished by a wildlife protection organization and the other from the county representative of ecotourism.

4.4. Crisis of legitimacy

In an earlier section, we briefly looked at disillusionment and civic action over the wolf project among the abovementioned interest groups. We saw how, among other things, disgruntled hunters are taking matters into their own hands as protest against the politics of wolf management. What can be inferred from such widespread discontentment is that the wolf project is found by many to be lacking in legitimacy. When policy-making is regarded as illegitimate it is often so because it is seen as representing the interests and values of a particular interest group (Rostbøll, 2008, p. 24). Wolf skeptics will often contend that the wolf project is run through the universalization and establishment of norm of chiefly the environmentalists’ preferences in a kind of hegemonic ‘nature first, people second’ policy

Crucially, there are three levels of legitimacy that should be considered in this paper: (1) instrumental legitimacy from the perspective of the system, (2) democratic legitimacy from the perspective of citizens and stakeholders and (3) procedural legitimacy derived from communicative action in the decision-making process, as according to Habermas’ theory.

If we turn first to instrumental legitimacy, Crook defines legitimacy rather abstractedly as “the moralization of authority” (Crook, 1987, p. 553). In other words, it is moral grounds that justify decisions and compel citizens to observe laws, in contrast to coercion or self-interest. This instrumental level of legitimacy is commonly assessed in the dimensions of outcome and compliance effectiveness (Wettstad, 2006). Importantly where wildlife projects are concerned, higher legitimacy of the project means a lower cost of process, as there is less need to enforce the compliance of rules.

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declining trust in authority reduces the motivation of citizens to cooperate at all, which creates instability and inefficiency in the system. In summary, accruing legitimacy from the perspective of the system takes on instrumental connotations of maximizing the efficiency of decisions in solving problems and meetings wolf management goals, but also in the form of the authorization of these decisions and the insurance of citizen compliance with policy. The second level of legitimacy is concerned less with systemic authorization and more with how well citizens and interest groups experience that the decision-making structure of the wolf project stacks up according to democratic criteria. This view of legitimacy holds that the way in which decisions are made is more important than the direct output or problem-solving capacity of these decisions (Sandström and Pellikka, 2008, p. 3). There are a number of criteria by which to assess democratic legitimacy. Salenvall (2011) for example examines the legitimacy of the new regionalized wildlife management with regards to how the model meets criteria of accountability, participation, political equality, representation and deliberative virtues. Sandström and Pellikka (2008) add criteria of legality, justifiability and transparency in their analysis of large carnivore management across Scandinavia. They rightly declare that this second level is also often a prerequisite for the first level of instrumental legitimacy. In line with Habermas’ theory chosen to address the rationality problematic, this paper emphasizes the importance of procedural legitimacy. The third level of legitimacy thus needs to be concerned with legitimacy as derived from communicative action in the decision-making process of wolf management. Dryzek’s classic formulation is that:

“Outcomes are legitimate to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation of those subject to the decision in question.”(Dryzek, 2001, p. 651)

Otherwise stated, wolf policy is only valid and legitimate if all of those affected by the policy can accept it in a reasonable discourse. According to Miller’s (2002) Habermasian perspective, legitimacy is derived from this communicative process and above all rests on all participants understanding as well as accepting why a particular outcome was reached even if, he adds, “disagreement remains about the substantive nature of any decision”. Legitimacy on this level should therefore reasonably be assessed through the participants’ process satisfaction (Hickerson & Gastil, 2008, p. 284). As we have stated in the foregoing theoretical chapter, Habermas regards public deliberative dialogue and communicative action as the means by which legitimacy is restored to society and freed from the grips of systemic steering media and from restrictive purposive rationality.

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5. The democratic structure of wolf management

We have now outlined the content of the wolf conflict, the major interest groups in the conflict and, finally, the crisis of legitimacy of the project. This following chapter looks at how the abovementioned stakeholder interests are formally articulated in the governance model. It introduces the regulatory framework for the regionalized wildlife management and concludes the chapter with the internal composition and decision-making structure of the present county wildlife management delegations, which will serve as an area for analysis of strategic rationality in the next chapter.

5.1. The formal framework for wolf management

ildlife management was centrally managed by the SEPA under the Swedish Riksdag until 2009. The shift from a centralized government authority on wolf management to a governance-based stakeholder model is thus relatively recent in Sweden. It can be connected to an international trend of regionalization and to EU influence (Funnemark, 2010). EU membership dictates that decisions are to be made on the lowest possible level, as according to the subsidiary principle. This now means the county level, which are 21 primary administrative and political subdivisions in Sweden.

The background to this is that wolf populations and resultant conflict and mistrust in the authority prompted an investigation into predators and their management (SOU 2007:89). This investigation laid down plans for the sustainable development of predators and proposed to reduce conflict and legitimize policy through a decentralization of their management. In 2008, the government gave the SEPA a mission to work out the concrete means by which this could be done. This is how the county wildlife management delegations were born. It can be noted that the SEPA still retains the overarching responsibility for the wolf conservation project. Its tasks are to determine minimum levels for the wolf population, to interpret results from inventories and to establish general directions of hunting and damage compensation pertaining to the wolf and other predators. The SEPA also oversees and evaluates the work of all county administrative boards in Sweden, to which the regional decision-making is now delegated in all counties that have fixed populations of wolf.

The decree (2009:1474) that stipulates the regional responsibility of the county wildlife management delegations was instated by the Department of Environmental Affairs in 2009. The body succeeded the wildlife management committee and regional predator groups under the county administrative board and. These two bodies previously held a limited and largely consultatory function but the present delegation is equipped to deal with decision-making. The stated aim of this institutional revamp when it was undertaken was to bring wildlife management closer to the people and in doing so produce more regionally suitable policies and to provide wolf and predator conservation with a higher degree of local support. It is useful here to look at the Swedish National Encyclopedia definition of wildlife management:

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[…] measures that serve to conserve the wild species of Swedish wildlife and that promote, with respect to common and particular interests, a suitable development of wild populations.

Moreover, it is the task of these delegations today to reach decisions concerning conservation plans, any licensed culling of wolves in their regions and issues of reimbursing damages or subsidizing in line with predator damage decrees 2001:724 and 2010:242. The delegations further contribute suggestions for minimum levels for the wolf population in their respective counties, based on the SEPA’s recommendations and on what the delegations collectively consider possible to accommodate in their regions. The county administrative boards that hold these delegations are responsible for inventory and for dispensing information prior to delegation meetings.

5.2. The composition of the county wildlife management

delegations

The internal composition of the county wildlife management delegations is such as to represent all affected interests in wildlife management and predator conservation. What interests are included and how the mandate is distributed among them is decided by the central government. There are 13-15 delegates in each delegation, depending on the interests present in each county. Its composition is summarized thusly:

1. Five delegates of political affiliation, who have been nominated by the county council. 2. One delegate involved in issues of illegal hunting and traffic safety with regards to

wildlife, nominated by the county police authority.

3. One delegate who represents hunting and wildlife management 4. One delegate who represents nature conservation

5. One delegate who represents the recreational outdoor interest. 6. One delegate who represents land owners and users of agriculture. 7. One delegate who represents local industry and tourism.

8. One delegate who represents the forestry interest.

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In addition to the abovementioned delegates, the head or chairman of the delegation is the county governor. Civil servants from the county administrative board also partake in the delegation. As was made clear during the workshops, they do not vote or exercise opinions. However, they serve the important function of administering information to the delegates and they also take protocol during the meetings. The protocols record the position taken by each delegate in a decision and thereby open up for transparency in decision-making and clearer accountability to one’s interest organization. The delegation may make decisions when both the county governor and at least three quarters of delegates are present. If the delegation is not unanimous in a decision, there is a vote that requires a majority of more than half (§12). If there should be an equal distribution of votes, the county governor holds the casting vote.

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6. Barriers to deliberation – empirical findings from

three county wildlife management delegation

workshops

The last chapter outlined the structure and working order of the delegations. This chapter presents the results from three delegation workshops, A, B and C which took place in the autumn of 2011. Findings take the form of reflections by delegates and direct communication observed during the workshop sessions. They are presented under four themes that have emerged in the process of reviewing the collected material.

n the following chapter, barriers to deliberation that account for the prevalence of the strategic stakeholder rationality among delegates will be presented. Four main themes or ‘problem aspects’ of the delegation work from a communicative point of view elucidate this phenomenon. These themes were identified as the following:

(1) Strong sense of accountability; (2) Overly purposive atmosphere; (3) Decision as final outcome; (4) Restricted ability to influence.

Before moving to these four themes, however, an example of the dynamics of the delegates will be given with the aim of showing how strategic rationality in general was articulated in this setting. This section also aims to show how, if at all, the delegates themselves perceived of this phenomenon and of the idea of bringing preconceived roles and interests to the forum. Importantly, it also considers the impact of retaining such a role on the discussion in plenary.

6.1. Strategic rationality in the delegations

The strong stakeholder-representative basis of the delegation constituted a point of contention in the workshop sessions. On the one hand, delegates welcomed the opportunity to put forward their interests which they maintained would otherwise lack a forum. On the other hand, an equally large number of delegates pointed to the fixed positions and delegate backgrounds as a negative aspect of the delegation work. In reflecting upon the decision meeting that took place in delegation A, one delegate admitted that he had found two other delegates locked in their positions by opinions determined prior to the meeting, to which one of the accused delegates answered, simply, that she must defend the industry she represents. Further, locking oneself in a role was often seen as inhibiting discussion in that the practice was associated with combative stances and conflict. One delegate observed:

“[One] situation is that among 16 delegates, you’re only one voice in the desert. You can get one or two delegates on your side, those for whom the

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question is not too relevant. But the large group that I fight against is more difficult. You bring a powerful preconception from home, you then go and discuss. I don’t bring forth my original question because this may silence the discussion. It is not a good idea to bring it into the delegation.”

The above statement highlights not only a normative goal of getting other delegates on your side and combating those that cannot be swayed to your preconceived cause, but it also makes plain the risk that such strategic action entails in the form of silencing the plenary discussion altogether. Some delegates were able to recognize the limitations of pursuing such normative orientation. One delegate, himself a political representative, contended that:

“We must see ourselves not as stakeholders but as civil servants or employees of the county administrative board.”

He later declared that he found the presence of actual civil servants with administrative tasks alone in the delegation to be “confusing” and redundant since “we are the employees”. What can be deduced from this delegate’s contribution, which he often re-phrased and repeated in the course of the workshop, is that he recognized a need to re-orient representation from the representation of individual interests to a representation of the common good.

The contribution of a second delegate serves to elucidate the problem of one’s background making one potentially more strategically inclined in one’s participation. This delegate was a representative of political affiliation, and she stated that she experienced a challenge in listening and mirroring the other person speaking because of her background as a politician. Seen from the point of view that she brought into the delegation, she argued, the purpose of discussion meetings was to provide debate with your opponent for the audience, not to engage in transformative dialogue with them. Moreover, she found herself stuck in a role where the goal was to prove the other person wrong and to prove that she was right.

Significantly, this same delegate offered of the listening and mirroring techniques taught in the course workshop that it was interesting to listen to the perspective of another delegate since she herself “did not have strong opinions on the matter that they discussed.” This statement reveals an important implication that in order to listen to another person’s perspective, you cannot hold opposing interests and, if you do, you cannot both have equally strong investment in the cause. Rather, such communicative practice works best when one does not feel strongly or is not particularly knowledgeable about the matter discussed. If such criteria were met however, the delegate saw the potential for a “giving” experience. This implication is equally apparent in the above citation that: “[…] you can get one or two delegates on your side, those for whom the question is not too relevant.”

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We can now look at a brief exchange that transpired in delegation A and which highlights the combative-strategic rationality associated with seeing others in terms of the preconceived interests they represent. The exchange was captured live and in notes and, as such, is incomplete. However, what could be collected serves to present the gist of the point:

Delegate A [representative of nature conservation]: “Now I risk standing alone in the corner for the rest of the day […] what worries me is that the delegation is in theory democratically constituted. But the reality is different. The hunting interest is represented from fifty to eighty-seven percent. I have evidence that this affects the outcome. This is certain.

In your county [addresses political representative], this is statistical. It has a negative impact on management from a conservation point of view.”

Delegate B [political representative]: “Hunting has as its purpose to conserve.”

Delegate A: “Your party has ensured that we have limitation politics.”

Delegate C: “It is difficult here up north to find people who are not affiliated with the hunting interest in some way.”

Delegate A: “That I can’t do shit about.”

Delegate D: “Yes, [hunting] is part of the social-cultural of man.”

Delegate B: “Even us hunters have scientific interest [refers to his time in Nature & Youth Sweden]. It is unreasonable to place hunting and conservation as dichotomous concepts.”

Delegate D: “This upsets me. Even if I am a hunter, I am interested in nature conservation.”

At the simplest level, what can be inferred from this exchange is that attributing other delegates with the role of bannermen out to champion their cause upsets those participants that get automatically labeled and conflated with their constituency. Moreover, the confrontational tone in which the exchange took place may also demonstrate an attachment to one’s interest and the resultant offense at a perceived misapprehension by fellow delegates of what this interest means. The last two contributions, by delegate B and D, exhibit clear attempts at fighting this attribution of a preconceived role and agenda.

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on your side. The next section, titled barriers to deliberation, will now consider strategic rationality illustrated above and present four themes that underlie the phenomenon and prevent communicative action.

6.3. Barriers to deliberation

6.3.1. Strong sense of accountability

What the meetings and workshops in the delegations revealed first of all was that the lock of an individual stake on rationality was inextricably tied to the responsibility one harbored toward one’s constituency. For this reason, this theme considers the strong sense of vertical accountability experienced by a number of delegates who spoke out in plenary.

When asked about the degree to which the delegates found the work of the delegation responsible, a few interesting answers appeared. On the whole, the delegates identified the responsibility associated with being a representative of an interest organization or a political party a good and self-evident thing to adhere to. Expectations and feedback from those one represented were both frequently placed under the ‘positive aspects’ category when evaluating the delegation work. One delegate noted how:

“There’s a positive rush from the people that I represent. They call me up and ask me what’s going on.”

Another delegate emphasized the importance of making things run in the delegation, adding that it is “up to us” and further asserted that there was a great sense of responsibility associated with the long-term protection of everyone’s interests. One representative declared that with the delegate position of representative of the hunting and wildlife interest, he was able to speak for some 20,000 hunters in his county and that sometimes this representation had the desired effects back home. Therefore, he considered the work responsible.

However, delegates also pointed to a difficulty in separating personal opinion from service duty. In delegation C, this was identified as the leading problem aspect of their work. A delegation A representative from the police authority stated that he regarded politics in the delegation as being about “loyalty toward the employer”. Furthermore, responsibility in the form of accountability was seen to have a more explicitly negative dimension:

“The reindeer herders of [county B] expect me to overcome the predator issue. This is not easy because of laws and more. They perhaps don’t understand that you don’t have a zero tolerance policy to predators […] it is not easy to explain to those at the far back that nothing is happening.”

A second issue of accountability to one’s interest organization or political party was raised through another delegate’s contribution that:

Democracy and Sustainable Development in wildlife management: