Civil society in local sustainable transformation – can bottom-up activities meet top-down expectations?

ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to explore whether and how local civil society – grounded in bottom-up activities – responds to a top-down initiative with expectations of sustainable transformation. The focus of our research is the possible role of civil society organizations as agents in collaborations aiming for a forest-based bioeconomy. The research was conducted in a local area within the sparsely populated Swedish region of Värmland, characterized by a strong tradition of forestry. The study is explorative and uses qualitative methods: interviews with representatives of local civil society actors, participant observations of local meetings and workshops, and document analyses. Our results suggest that general policy expectations concerning the inclusion of civil society become vague when operationalized in documents at the regional level, and lack clarity concerning the roles expected from civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) contribute in a multitude of ways to local social, economic, and environmental sustainability. However, the inclusion of CSOs as full actors in collaborations requires a greater knowledge of the traditions and structure of Swedish civil society, as well as its conditions and challenges in different local contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• partner initiative
• local sustainable transformation
• Värmland‌
• Sweden

Introduction

The call for sustainable development formulated according to UN Sustainable Development Goals is a call to action on multiple levels, including all sectors of society. One of the many challenges to the sustainable development of society is the transformation from fossil raw materials to renewable ones produced through sustainable use of ecosystems. The term sustainability came into use with the Brundtland Commission's report Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). This conceptualization of sustainability draws on three integrated dimensions; ecology, economy and social welfare. Within the model the dimensions are considered as equally important.

To comprise all sectors of society includes the involvement of civil society, which has been on the agenda on a global level at least since the 1992 Earth Summit (Sénit, 2020). Arguments for including civil society movements and non-governmental organizations in sustainable development relates to the potential to tap into their knowledge to contribute to resolve these challenges. This is also in line with ideas of co-creation of knowledge and participatory innovation thinking. In addition, there is a democratic aspect to the inclusion of the civil society in decision-making and planning processes (Grundel, 2018; Grundel & Dahlström, 2016).

Civil society organizations (CSO) and civil society actors often carry positive connotations in research and political debate, in pursuing public rather than private interests. (Frantz & Fuchs, 2014). On a global level sustainable development rhetoric has put a strong emphasis on grass-root and civil society engagement, representation and transparency in policy processes, with an underlying assumption that participation and representation by non-state actors in multilateral environmental negotiations strengthen the democratic basis on environmental governance (Bäckstrand, 2006). Furthermore, it is argued that civil society contribute to the balancing of power in complex governance arrangements (Frantz & Fuchs, 2014). Since the 1992 Earth Summit spaces for civil society participation within intergovernmental negotiation on sustainability has multiplied. However, scholars point at the complexity of this involvement and that the actual influence and effects of civil society involvement remain contested. (Sénit, 2020). Commonly civil society actors are not fully included in broad collaborations since citizen-based knowledge is often seen as diffuse and challenging to integrate in policy-making processes (Isenhour, 2011). Often actors with economic interests are more powerful than civil society actors which creates challenges for these actors to contribute their knowledge and perspectives in collaboration (Knudtzon, 2018). Further, scholars point at the lack of formalized ways for civil society actors to influence policymaking beyond the right to voice their view (Biermann, 2014). Instead, engagement takes place in informal participatory spaces where highly organized professionalized civil society actors have privileged access, compared to the resourceless (Sénit, 2020). Frantz and Fuchs (2014) points at a risk for normativity of civil society participation, related to whose interest the respective civil society actors represent and what the sustainability perspectives of the corresponding interest are. Civil society represents a breadth of interests in different policy debates.

Global goals of sustainable development are transformed through multi-level strategies and programmes, through the EU (EC, 2012, 2018, 2019), to national policies, regional strategic initiatives, and played out on local governments and administrations. Consequently, we argue that expectations of civil society involvement in initiatives for sustainable development are placed on the local civil society.

So far, empirical studies exploring the operationalizing of top-down expectations and whether and how local civil society practices correspond to such expectations, are scarce. This indicates the need to understand local civil society engagement as bottom-up practices in a policy environment of growing top-down expectations for local civil society involvement.

In the county of Värmland in western Sweden, initiatives to promote sustainable transformation through the development of a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy have been in focus over the past decade. This has been conducted through a partnership initiative – Paper Province 2.0 – which, under the leadership of the cluster organization Paper Province, is organized in a partnership, including Region Värmland, Karlstad University, as well as a wide range of firms, authorities, and other research institutions. Under this initiative, the partnership's ambitions are to contribute to a more sustainable society as a whole in terms of environmental as well as social and economic aspects of a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy. Social sustainability is expressed as focusing on needs and ideas of people and through these contribute to inclusive, equal and democratic development of society (Paper Province, 2013). These ambitions stress the need for more actors, including actors from civil society, to become involved. (Foray et al., 2012).

From the start of Paper Province 2.0, the Paper Province cluster organization, Region Värmland, and researchers at Karlstad University all acknowledged the need to better understand the roles that civil society could take in regional innovation systems, including the ambition to contribute to the transformation of society in general to a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy. Research also concluded that at that time, i.e., only a few years into the initiative, little had happened to include civil society in the processes. (Grundel & Dahlström, 2016). This finding calls for research into this matter.

To study the local manifestation of this partner initiative we have chosen one of the local settings for the initiative, i.e., the municipality of Torsby in the northern part of the county of Värmland. Several workshops organized by the partner initiative has taken place in Torsby, and in 2013 the initiative The Wood Region (now Circlab) was established in the area with support from Torsby municipality. It is a test bed in relation to 3D printing of wood composite that e.g., make use of byproducts from forestry.¹

The overall aim with this this article is to investigate whether and how local civil society grounded in bottom-up activities, corresponds to a top-down initiative with expectations for civil society concerning sustainable transformation.

The empirical study was guided by the following questions:

• − How are expectations for civil society expressed in a top-down sustainable transformation initiative?

• − What activities can we identify in local civil society that can be understood to contribute to sustainable transformation?

To answer these questions, we trace the expectations through a document analysis of the above mentioned initiative to contribute to sustainable transformation through a forest-based bioeconomy and an interview study supplemented with input from workshops to explore ways in which local civil society actions support sustainable transformation.

Below we turn to the conceptual framework of the article, followed by a more detailed explanation of the research context, materials, and methods. After this, the main part of the article describes the results, analysis, and finally the conclusion, where we return to the question of whether and how the expectations from the top-down initiative and bottom-up civil society activities meet.

Conceptual Framework

The concept of sustainable development has over time come to have many different definitions and uses. A common feature is that a sustainable development is perceived a necessity to ensure the future for humanity on the planet (Hoppstadius & Dahlström, 2015). In the Brundtland report (1987, unpaginated document) sustainable development is defined as development ‘ … that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. With this definition sustainable development adopts a holistic perspective on balancing the three aspirations of increased environmental protection without cutting back on economic development or hindering social achievements. (Hoppstadius & Dahlström, 2015). The concept has also been criticized for being hollowed out by the different ways it's been used, having a double nature, i.e., claiming to combine sociocultural and environmental preservation with economic development (Redclift, 2005), while the three dimensions rarely move in the same direction in practice (Frantz & Fuchs, 2014). Another criticism relates to the tendency that sustainable development has focused on economic development to a greater extent than including social and environmental aspects of development (Miedzinsik et al., 2021; Truffer & Coenen, 2012).

A central concept for the article is civil society, which share the same difficulties with a common definition as described above. Civil society has come to be used as an umbrella-term for heterogenous activities and forms of organization, including umbrella-organizations, social movements, NGOs, unions, as well as more loosely organized grass-root networks and citizens’ voluntary work. It is often understood as separated from the state/public sector, from the market/private businesses and the private sphere including family, relatives and friends (Lundström & Wijkström, 1997; von Essen, 2021). The concept tends to be given a normative meaning and is often perceived as morally good, which does not have to be the case (von Essen, 2021). In the present empirical study, we focus on organized civil society, i.e., civil society organizations (CSO); associations in the form of voluntary association and economic association (Wijkström & Lundström, 2002).

In our analyzes of civil society organizations’ contribution to sustainable transformation our starting point is institutional organization theories, where organizations are understood to be open systems (Ahrne & Papakostas, 2002) embedded in and dependent on their institutional environment, including the prevailing general welfare regime (Arvidson et al., 2018; Reuter et al., 2012) and the historical context (Henriksen et al., 2019). This dependence includes access to necessary resources, such as financial or technical resources as well as information, knowledge, contacts, and legitimacy (Johansson et al., 2019). However, this is not a one-way relationship. Organizations – in our study with a focus on civil society organizations – influence and affect their environment, not least through their voice, influencing factors such as governmental policy (Lundström & Wijkström, 1997). At the local level, CSOs are embedded in the institutional environment, with a prevailing socio-economic situation (e.g., population size, demography, structure of local labour market), history, and traditions, which is an organizational environment with both enabling resources and obstructions (Zimmer, 2006). Furthermore, local civil society are embedded in national traditions and structures of civil society and its relationship to the state. Swedish civil society has been described as being rooted in a ‘popular movement tradition‘ (Hvenmark & Wijkström, 2004; Lundström & Wijkström, 1997; Olsson et al., 2009) involving democratic education and the protection of a democratic society, in which the role of voice – advocacy and representation – is still important (Arvidson et al., 2018; Johansson et al., 2019). This description of Swedish civil society is still relevant, although changes have pervaded it in recent decades that have brought an even greater degree of heterogeneity to the sector and changing modes of organization (Trägårdh et al., 2013a; Wijkström & Zimmer, 2011). These changes include e.g., a growing influence of the market and co-operation with private actors (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004; Fyrberg Yngfalk & Hvenmark, 2014; Wijkström & Einarsson, 2006).

Exploring the Roles of CSOs

One way of analyzing civil society has focused on the roles of this sector in relation to the government/public sector, private sector/enterprises, or households (Enjolras & Sivesind, 2018). These roles have been labelled as providing services for members and others, and/or acting as a ‘voice’ or ‘schools of democracy’ advocating for and representing different group interests in society and allowing individuals and groups to assert their interests and to guard this freedom (Arvidson et al., 2018; Enjolras & Sivesind, 2018; Johansson et al., 2019; Lundström & Wijkström, 1997). A third type of role, in addition to voice and service, is community, which encompasses a central part of Swedish civil society, including sports, culture, and religion (Wijkström & Lundström, 2002).

Theories of roles have mainly had a macro-level focus, although there are examples of analytical work of roles in specific organizational fields, such as social welfare (Blennberger, 1993) or narrower fields such as homelessness (Nordfeldt, 1999). Related to the field of interest in this article is the work of Lyth et al. (2017) who suggest three common ways in which organizations facilitate social change: by (1) enhancing social connectivity through boundary work, (2) mobilizing participatory citizenship, and (3) contributing to social learning. Furthermore, theories of CSO's roles have primarily had an urban focus, while previous research indicates that the objectives and actions of rural CSOs differ from those that are urban based (Berglund, 1998; Cras, 2017; Lyth et al., 2017). Roles of local civil society in rural areas are thus under-studied and under-theorized. Based on this reasoning, we turn to the sociologist Swedberg’s (2012) ideas on theorizing in social science. Swedberg emphasizes the process of discovery based on one's own empirical work, i.e., a primarily inductive way to create theory. Using the analytical concept of roles inspired by the above-mentioned literature, our work is not inductive in a strict sense. We take our empirical material as the point of departure and conceptualize the roles of civil society with a focus on sustainable transformation in a rural forest-based context.

Research Context

The study was conducted in the county of Värmland, which is a sparsely populated region of over 17,000 km², almost the size of Wales. Around 282,000 inhabitants live in the region, of whom a third live in the county capital of Karlstad. As much as 70% of Värmland is covered by forests, and forestry and the paper and pulp industry have a long and strong tradition in the region.

A point of departure for the study is a large-scale, long-term, and strategic initiative of transformation to a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy in Värmland.² The initiative relates to the development over the past couple of decades whereby Värmland's strength in forestry, paper, and pulp has become an essential part of the regional innovation system. Key actors in this development are the cluster organization Paper Province, Region Värmland (the authority in charge of regional development), and Karlstad University. This partnership collaboration began as a long-term commitment in 2013 when the actors won co-funding for 10 years from Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency. The initiative, which has a budget of SEK 130M, was named Paper Province 2.0. It aims to develop Värmland to become ‘the leading competence node for forest-based bioeconomy’ (Paper Province, 2016b, p. 2). Although it is a technology-focused initiative, it also stresses the need to involve further actors in this endeavour, including civil society (Paper Province, 2013, p. 1). In addition, it has the explicit ambition to contribute to a more sustainable society as a whole in terms of social, economic, and environmental aspects of a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy. A further strengthening of this initiative is the Värmland Research and Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialization 2015–2020, wherein the forest-based bioeconomy is given the highest priority (Region Värmland, 2015). An important aspect of smart specialization strategies is the recommendation that civil society, clients, and users should be included in regional innovation systems (Foray et al., 2012). This has influenced Värmland's strategy, which asserts the need to broaden the partnership between public authorities, firms, higher education and research institutions to involve organized civil society (Region Värmland, 2015, p. 27).

Since the aim to include civil society in the transformation to a sustainable forest-based society are explicitly mentioned in the initiative Paper Province 2.0 and Värmland's smart specialization strategy we argue that Värmland is an ideal setting for exploring the expectations and possible roles of civil society in the sustainability transformation in the (potential) meeting between the top-down initiatives of and bottom-up activities. To examine the bottom-up activities, we focus on the local level which is where activities take place: in this case the municipality of Torsby, located in the north of Värmland county. Torsby municipality covers an area of 4,162 km², more than 2.5 times the size of Greater London. It is sparsely populated by 11,700 inhabitants, of whom around 4,500 live in the main town of Torsby.

Including the country side, Torsby hosts a large and vivid civil society of around 300 associations, for example associations for sport, motoring, hunting, fishing, shooting, community work, local history, culture and arts, local parishes, pensioners’ associations, and the Red Cross.³ Civil society in Torsby represents a rather traditional popular movement structure.

Materials and Methods

The article is based on empirical material from three complementary sources. At the heart of the study are interviews with representatives of local CSOs. In addition, a review of 15 key documents was performed, and participation in workshops also contributed data.

The interviews were carried out during April to June 2019. The selection of local CSOs was based on maximum variation (Creswell & Poth, 2018) with the point of departure being a presumption that the selected CSOs were engaged in activities that could be defined as related to sustainable transformation and/or forestry. Eleven interviews were conducted with a total of 15 CSO representatives occupying leadership positions on a voluntary basis or employed by the CSO. A semi-structured guide was used for the interviews, which were recorded and transcribed.

In this article, organizations and respondents are treated anonymously, i.e., no names are used, either for interviewees or the organizations they represent. Organizations are described by type and their activities. However, in a sparsely populated area such as Torsby, it may be possible to recognize organizations and people from the descriptions below. Yet our interest is in facts about and the activities of the organization that the interviewee represents, not the respondent personally, so no sensitive personal data were collected.

The empirical material in the research is gathered by two researchers. One researcher has been engaged in research and interaction with key actors in the regional innovation system in Värmland, particularly in relation to the forest-based bioeconomy, for almost 10 years. This researcher is inspired by a transdisciplinary research design recognizing the importance of a variety of actors in knowledge production from different spheres of society (Mobjörk, 2010). This has influenced the methods used e.g., to utilize knowledge generated in the collaborative workshops described below.

Results

In this section, we turn back to our research questions by structuring the presentation of our results. First, we analyze how expectations for civil society are expressed in Paper Province 2.0. Second, we give examples of local civil society's contribution to sustainable transformation.

How are Expectations for Civil Society Expressed in a Top-down Sustainable Transformation Initiative?

For the review of key documents, 15 strategic documents from the Paper Province 2.0 initiative from 2013 to 2020 were identified in which any expectations of civil society were likely to be expressed. These documents include the original application for funding of the initiative, action plans, annual and project reports, and international evaluations. To be able to answer the research question on how expectations for civil society are expressed in a top-down sustainable transformation initiative we especially set out to search for parts of the text where ‘civil’ and ‘quadruple helix’⁴ were mentioned. Where either of these concepts was found, the full text of the relevant chapter or section was examined.

The 15 key documents included seven documents that relate to the first phase of three and a half years of the initiative (Paper Province, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b). The review reveals that the role of civil society was not a top priority at the beginning of the initiative, and no explicit expectations for civil society were stated in the documents. However, civil society attracted more interest towards the end of this phase. Greater efforts were made to communicate the initiative and to interact with actors with whom the cluster organization had not previously interacted (Paper Province, 2017b, p. 11).

A review of the key documents from the next phase (2017–2019) of the initiative reveals a more explicit plan for the development of ways of working to engage civil society further in the transformation to a bioeconomy (Paper Province, 2017c, 2017d, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2020a; and Rudberg & Kempinsky, 2019). However, the expectations for civil society are vague. At the outset of the initiative's final phase (2020–2023), the role of civil society was still imprecise. In the action plan, the inclusion of civil society is identified as one of the eight goals for the period. A stated objective is that, at the close of the phase, the initiative should have engaged public sector and civil society organizations to a greater extent in the development of a green economy in the region (Paper Province, 2020b, p. 2).

The Climate smart innovation project explicitly included engagement of civil society. This was a 3.5-year project, finished in 2019. This project included four workshops at the local level in different parts of Värmland. In its project evaluation, Paper Province concluded that these workshops had been rewarding in terms of steps toward developing new ways of working and collaborating between industry, regional authorities, Karlstad University, and civil society. As a result, Paper Province decided to offer two additional sets of local workshops of this type outside the project (Paper Province, 2019b). The authors of this article took part in the final set of two such workshops that took place in Torsby in 2019.

The format of the workshops was participatory and interactive with a strong focus on generating ideas in relation to the forest based bioeconomy but also with regards to sustainability of society as a whole. Participants in the workshops consisted of a mix of persons representing the initiative Paper Province, Torsby municipality, the Region of Värmland, local private companies, and to a lesser degree local CSOs. Interesting to note is that nearly half of the participants that formally represented public or private actors, also were engaged in CSOs. We discuss this type of ‘pluri-positionality’ (Tillberg Mattsson & Stenbacka, 2003) of engaged citizens, further down in this section.

The first workshop generated a wide range of ideas in relation to a transformation to sustainability. These ranged from household issues such as recycling, reduction of food waste, investment in solar panels on homes, and car sharing to societal issues requiring collaboration between actors, large investments, and political decisions. Examples include switching to electric or gas-fuelled cars in the local authority fleet, the provision of an electric bike pool for citizens, developing bioplastics from waste from forestry and sawmills, and local public green procurement. Among the potential solutions, it is worth noting that different types of collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and practical examples were frequently mentioned. The second workshop mainly focused on the need to increase knowledge among citizens, politicians, businesses, and public officials regarding transformation to sustainability. The existence of much local competence was acknowledged, and specific ideas about how to harness this and share knowledge in many different ways depending on target groups were identified.

What Activities Can We Identify in Local Civil Society That Can Be Understood to Contribute to Sustainable Transformation?

‘It's more association life than there are people’ (Interview 1)

The results presented below are based on interviews with representatives of local CSOs in Torsby on their activities and roles. It should not be seen as a systematic mapping of roles, but as an effort to highlight examples of what the local civil society is actually doing. In our analyses we use the analytical concepts of roles of civil society presented in our conceptual framework above.

Local civil society activities cover a broad set of roles, from providing – or advocating for access to – services and infrastructure to providing a sense of community and local cohesion. The roles we have identified are presented under the headings Maintaining Service and Infrastructure, Provision of Knowledge and Social learning, Preservation and development of Local assets, and Community building. Furthermore, we discuss Civil society as an Arena for engaged Citizens and finally Local embeddedness – Opportunities and Barriers.

Maintaining Service and Infrastructure

Inhabitants of rural areas have experienced the vanishing of services and infrastructure, such as grocery stores, schools, or petrol stations (cf. Amcoff et al., 2009, 2015; Cras, 2017). In some of these areas, services and infrastructure are maintained by citizen initiatives within the frame of civil society (Cras, 2017, 2018). An example of maintaining services from a small village in Torsby municipality is a local football association taking over and managing a grocery store threatened by closure. The store also functions as a service centre, including a post office and a restaurant that delivers food to elderly people in the area on commission for the municipality. An extended social role for the store/service centre is that it offers a meeting place for people in the area for both informal gatherings and formal board meetings of CSOs and companies. Local citizens are engaged in voluntary work related to the store. Furthermore, the football association offers entrepreneurial services such as painting, cutting grass, and clearing snow. By maintaining the store and service point, civil society contributes to social and economic sustainability in the area and thereby has a role in community building. Indirectly, they also contribute to environmental sustainability since the food deliveries to elderly people does not have to be carried out over such long distances as if they would have been organized centrally from Torsby town.

Another way to maintain local service and infrastructure is to use the traditional ‘voice’ role of civil society, as discussed above. A CSO that can be defined as a local development group uses its voice to put pressure on the local government and authorities in relation to identified local needs. Central issues for this CSO at the time of the interview were local infrastructure in a broad sense, including repairing of roads within the area, improving road lighting, and establishment of optic fibre for internet access. The development group also initiates practical activities to engage local citizens, for example, in renovating a public beach. Another task for this CSO is to forward start-up funding to associations that take over and manage activities that are initiated by the development organization. By advocating for service and infrastructure, as well as initiating and supporting new activities, this CSO contributes in different ways to social and economic sustainability.

Provision of Knowledge and Social Learning

Provision of knowledge and social learning are central roles of civil society organizations. Popular adult education organizations have a long tradition in Swedish society and are rooted in the popular movement tradition. These CSOs are associated with ideas of strengthening democracy, enabling diversity, raising the level of education, and supporting participation in cultural life (Svedberg & von Essen, 2015; see also von Essen & Sundgren, 2012).

A Torsby CSO that participated in the study is a local branch of a national popular adult education organization. Such organizations employ the method of study circles focusing on different interests (Sundgren, 2012), often based on local interests and needs. The organization also arranges courses, cultural events, and exhibitions, often in collaboration with other local CSOs and local public institutions such as the library. At the time of the interview, recent study courses were a film course targeting young women, a computer course targeting elderly citizens, and a course on how to plan one's pension. An aim to contribute to social sustainability was described in relation to the computer course for elderly people. A role of this CSO is to provide an arena for engaged citizens. Study circles are sometimes initiated by citizens engaged in environmental issues with different focus, such as how to produce one's own electricity, the ecology of the forest, food waste, and how to grow one's own food.

Among the local CSOs, one small organization stands out for its focus on transformation to a forest-based bioeconomy. This organization started in 2006 but has its base in a small film business that since the 1970s has documented issues of knowledge production about the environment and climate in different parts of the world. The organization disseminates and communicates scientific research, and connects parties such as researchers and entrepreneurs through conferences and seminars. Its explicit ambition is to contribute to mobilization and learning about environmental and climate issues.

This CSO works on networking (across boundaries, to use the terminology of Lyth et al., 2017) by targeting and connecting people in different positions and sectors of society – i.e., entrepreneurs, politicians, researchers, officials, and representatives of CSOs – at the local, regional, and national levels. The interviewee emphasized the importance of keeping current and up to date, by following research and developments in the field of interest closely.

The CSO works across geographical borders, especially with neighbouring Norway. Although this organization is rather young, its basis can be found in the popular adult education movement and concepts such as democracy, engagement, participation, and education that encapsulate the aims and values of this organization.

Preservation and Development of Local Assets

A common type of local CSO in rural Sweden comprise associations linked to community heritage farm buildings. These organizations run activities related to local history and cultural sustainability, as well as preservation of natural resources. Such activities also contain dimensions of development. These CSOs run a variety of activities, such as preservation and maintenance of historical buildings and various types of social gatherings and study circles; they can also function as local development groups (cf. Berglund, 1998; Cras, 2017). The CSO in the interview study, which also participated in workshops, was involved in the preservation and maintenance of several historical buildings, primarily on a voluntary basis but to some extent funded by the municipality.

In northern Värmland, a significant proportion of these farms were built by the Finns who started to populate this area in the early seventeenth century in what is known as the Finn Forest area, while other historic farms have Swedish origins. The preservation of these buildings can therefore be interpreted as a way to create social sustainability based on the local community's historical roots. An example of a local heritage society activity that includes environmental sustainability in the area is maintaining local hiking trails. Otherwise, the main activities of the organizations are linked to the preservation of heritage buildings and letting them to the summer cafés that form part of local tourism, as well as offering guided tours. In this respect, these CSOs contribute to social and economic sustainability as well.

Activities that combine historical, cultural, economic, and environmental aspects are also performed by the local development group described above. This development group is involved in the preservation of local shielings (Sw.: fäbod/säter) with different activities, including arranging tours of shielings. Shielings are part of an historic agro-forestry system in which nearby summer forest grazing, where farm women lived and made milk products, made up an important part of the self-sufficiency farming in these largely forested areas.

Another common type of organization in Sweden, not least in Värmland, is game hunting and management organizations. They are organized into hunting districts and belong to national umbrella organizations. These CSOs arrange hunting, mainly annual elk and roe deer hunting, with the local ‘team’ of hunters, but can include outside hunters both national and international. Their activities include game management, which besides hunting also involves work in the forest to create conditions for hunting and education of new hunters, which is a requirement for a weapons license. This type of organization has a long tradition of environmental sustainability work, but also as a community for hunters. There are a range of economic interests involved in the hunting, such as providing and sometimes selling meat, but also those of private forest owners who can rent out hunting grounds. In this way, the hunting associations contribute to a kind of forest-based tourism in this area.

Community Building

A central role for civil society can be defined as community building, i.e., providing different leisure activities such as sports, culture, or other recreation, or simply being together with others (Trägårdh et al., 2013b; Wijkström & Lundström, 2002). This part of civil society was not the focus of our study. Even so, the role of community building emerges as essential for the local civil society's contribution to sustainability, as illustrated by an interviewee's comment that the aim of their activities was to ‘keep the community alive’ (Interview 9). Even if this was not expressed in the same way in the interviews and workshops, this aim was implicit. Other examples are the above-mentioned courses and study circles organized by the popular education organization and the work by the local development group to facilitate everyday life for people living in the area.

Civil Society as an Arena for Engaged Citizens

CSOs consist of and are managed by individuals with different levels of engagement. Interviews and workshops suggest that engagement in certain issues, such as environmental sustainability, involves individuals engaged within the frame of CSOs, rather than with particular CSO's aims and activities. In this way, civil society in a broad sense is an arena for citizens engaged in societal issues.

In the interviews, specific people and occasionally groups were mentioned as driving forces, or local enthusiasts (Sw: ‘eldsjälar’). In previous research, local enthusiasts have been highlighted as central resources in relation to local development in rural areas. For example, they can possess leadership and the ability to express themselves and are sometimes described as a necessary force for local development (Forsberg, 2010). They can also have a role as catalysts for the commitment of others (Lindberg, 2005).

Not unusually, these engaged citizens have the role as a ‘spider in the web’, or as Lyth et al. (2017) put it, they enhance social connectivity through boundary work in local civil society, as well as with public and private actors. Tillberg Mattsson and Stenbacka (2003) proposed the concept of ‘pluri-positionality’ to describe this phenomenon with individuals simultaneously holding positions in the private, public, and voluntary sectors. These positions can also be consecutive. Although we did not systematically investigate the interviewees’ and workshop participants’ positions in different sectors in society, we find the concept of ‘pluri-positionality’ useful for describing engaged citizens in Torsby civil society.

Local Embeddedness – Opportunities and Barriers

Local civil society is embedded in a local institutional environment, with a socio-economic situation (e.g., population size, demography, structure of local labour market) and history and traditions; it is an environment with both opportunities and barriers for local civil society engagement (Zimmer, 2006). Interviewees describe Torsby as characterized on the one hand by a tradition of a strong and vivid civil society, as demonstrated above. On the other, local civil society has clear challenges related to rejuvenation. A recurring story in the interviews is the problem of attracting new members, especially young(er) people. It is particularly problematic to engage new board members.

However, this development is not unique to Torsby, but is rather an international trend. During recent decades, member-based organizations have generally experienced a decline in membership, while voluntary engagement remains steady but with a different relationship with the organizations than membership (Einarsson & Hvenmark, 2012). A general development of engagement in civil society is for long-term engagement in an association to be replaced by engagement and volunteering on a temporary basis and engagement in specific activities (cf. Einarsson & Hvenmark, 2012; Zimmer & Pahl, 2018).

While regrowth and long-term commitment are reported to be a challenge in local CSOs in Torsby, citizens are described as being easy to engage in certain events or occasional activities, e.g., football cups and motoring events. A more specific example given is when the grocery store discussed above needed help to replace its refrigerator and freezer and 25 people arrived to help out.

Discussion

The aim of this article was to explore whether and how local civil society, grounded in bottom-up activities, corresponds to a top-down initiative with expectations for civil society on sustainable transformation.

Initially, we claimed that there are top-down expectations that civil society will contribute to the sustainable societal transformation processes expressed in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals at the global and EU levels, as well as formulated on a regional level. Regional innovation strategies and initiatives stress the need to involve civil society actors in collaboration and partnerships with actors such as firms, public authorities and higher education and research institutions. (Grundel & Dahlström, 2016). This interest in civil society has been explicitly stressed in the Paper Province 2.0 initiative.

From the analyses of key documents of the initiative, we can conclude that there is a lack of clarity on the more explicit role(s) that are expected from civil society. For example, it is not clear what part of civil society that should be involved or how CSOs are expected to contribute. One possible explanation for this vagueness is the established strong and active relationship between firms, public authorities and higher education and research institutions in the region in relation to sustainable transformation to a forest-based bioeconomy. The actors involved know each other well and have developed a close working relationship, which may offer limited opportunities for other actors to participate and thereby include actors from civil society in the collaboration. Furthermore, civil society is very diverse, and there is no ready ‘off-the-shelf’ method for identifying relevant actors and how to engage with them. This vagueness goes in line with the ambiguity in CSO's impact on sustainable development found by Frantz and Fuchs (2014).

In relation to our second research question, we have identified a multitude of roles that civil society adopts to contribute to local sustainability. The CSOs in our study engage in activities in relation to social, economic, and environmental sustainability, with a primary focus on social sustainability – 'to keep the community alive’. This indicates that less attention is paid to local sustainable transformation than to the possibilities for people to continue to work and live in this geographical area, by eg. providing essential services or advocate for services and infrastructure from the local government. A central task for social sustainability is to contribute to community building by offering different types of leisure activities as well as opportunities and arenas for local citizens simply to come together. The results indicate less focus on economic and environmental sustainability, although there are examples of organizations providing job opportunities, which can be read as contributing to economic sustainability, albeit on a limited scale. And, in an even smaller scale, contributions to local environmental sustainability by an organization with a special interest in environmental and climate issues. Furthermore, civil society contributes to sustainability through the preservation and development of local historical and natural assets.

To understand the roles of local civil society, the concept of embeddedness is crucial. Civil society activities are embedded in a local socio-economic situation as well as local history and traditions, i.e., an environment that involves both opportunities and barriers for local civil society activities. In Torsby, its history and traditions are described in terms of a vivid and lively civil society with locally engaged citizens who perform voluntary work. However, the civil society is described as ageing, struggling to recruit new members, especially for long-term commitments such as board membership. This latter development is consistent with a general change in member-based organizations.

Activities of organizations that constitute local branches of national organizations are partly controlled by activities initiated at the national level. However, our study suggests that local activities primarily are based on bottom-up local engagement, corresponding to local demands and needs. In relation to the issue of environmental sustainability and interests in a forest-based bioeconomy, this interest is mainly driven by engaged citizens, e.g., ‘local enthusiasts’. For engaged citizens, civil society constitutes an arena in which to pursue this personal engagement. Nevertheless, local engagement and activities can be described as quite disparate and not in any significant sense aimed at transformation. And, maybe that's the way it should be? As Smith (2012) suggests from his studies on civil society in sustainable energy transitions; that the heterogeneous activities of civil society, based on a broad set of values and visions, should not be expected to be coherent and well coordinated.

To conclude, the local civil society studied in this case contributes to social sustainability, to some degree to economic sustainability, and to a lesser degree to environmental sustainability. There have been efforts to involve civil society in regional strategic initiatives on sustainable transformation. However, when the need to include all parts of society is expressed in general policies such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and in EU regional innovation strategies, its operationalization at regional and local levels becomes vague. While there is a lack of clarification in the Paper Province 2.0 strategic documents, there also seems to be a mismatch between expectations on civil society's involvement in regional innovation systems and the local structure of civil society, which in turn is embedded in a Swedish mass movement tradition. This mismatch is particularly evident in relation to the development of a forest-based bioeconomy, which, with some exception, is not an area of interest for local civil society. The ambitions and attempts to include civil society, by eg. open workshops, has so far mainly had a top-down perspective. We claim that to enable the actual involvement of civil society actors in broad collaborations for local sustainable transformation, there is a need to base this involvement on knowledge of the traditions and structure of the Swedish civil society, as well as the formation and prerequisites of civil society in different local contexts. Existing collaboration and partnerships between firms, public authorities and higher education and research institutions need to be open minded and inclusive of new actors, not only in words but in practice.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank our interviewees and participants in local workshops in Torsby. We also want to express our thanks for comments on earlier versions of the text received at the CRS writing workshop at Karlstad University and the Green Economies workshop at Örebro University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vinnova under Grant number 2016–04227.

Notes

1 https://torsby.se/thewoodregion/thewoodregion.4.1a647e2e175b9d845e73e9a4.html.

2 For a deeper description, see Jolly et al. (2020).

3 https://torsby.se/upplevagora/foreningarforeningsliv (2020-11-17).

4 The term ‘quadruple helix’ was used since it is a concept used within the sphere of innovation studies and strategies such as smart specialisation. It is based on the concept ‘triple helix’ which means collaboration or partnerships between (1) firms, (2) public authorities and (3) higher education and research institutions. The fourth helix making up the collaboration/partnership ‘quadruple helix’ is actors from civil society. (Grundel & Dahlström, 2016)