The Collaborative Governance thematic working group invites you to a webinar with Annica Sandström on how institutional shifts relate to changes in forest policy and actor dynamics over time.
🎤 Webinar: “Policy Areas in Transition: How Institutional Shifts Relate to Rising Conflict in Swedish Forest Policy”
🗓️ Monday, 24 August 2026
🕑 08:30 Mountain Time (Arizona) / 11:30 Eastern Daylight Time / 17:30 CAT/CEST
🔗 Register to attend here
ℹ️ Webinar abstract:
Every policy subsystem, whether forestry, health care, or energy, has its own cast of actors: ministries and agencies, industry, interest organizations, researchers, media. Together with the rules and venues where they meet, this is what policy scholars call a policy subsystem. Understanding why such subsystems evolve over time, and how changes in their character and dynamics unfold, remains a central puzzle in policy studies. This seminar addresses that topic through the case of Swedish forest policy, a domain that has moved towards more adversarial dynamics over the past three decades.
This seminar opens with a brief introduction to the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the research framework behind concepts such as policy subsystems, advocacy coalitions, and focus on belief-driven policy conflict. But the main part presents an ongoing study that traces the development of the Swedish forest policy subsystem and analyzes how institutional shifts, such as increasing cross-subsystem policy integration and collaborative governance arrangements, relate to changes in the subsystem’s structure and actor dynamics over time. A central and perhaps counterintuitive finding is that these arrangements, rather than managing conflict, worked to bring new and intensified conflicts into the formal policy process.
ℹ️ More information on the speaker:
Annica Sandström is Professor of Political Science at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. Her research on environmental policy and natural resource governance examines how institutions, actors, and coalitions shape public policy across forest, marine, freshwater, wildlife, and mineral domains. In this seminar, she presents ongoing research on policy dynamics in Swedish forest policy, seen through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework.
