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

Abstract

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

Keywords:

• forest policy
• land use policy
• climate policy
• argumentative discourse analysis
• advocacy coalition framework
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) for supporting our research on forest biodiversity and climate change policy through its Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), in particular within the research project: ‘Forests and Climate Change’ (reference number 3508 83 0600). Furthermore, we thank the participants of the panel ‘Sustainable development and policy change: changing policies through discourse’ at the 5^th Interpretative Policy Analysis Conference in Grenoble, and two anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

1. In the absence of a common coordinated EU forest policy (which was not provided for by the European treaties and was, until recently, not promoted by a sufficient majority of EU member states, cf. Winkel et al. 2009), the Pan-European Ministerial Conferences on the Protection of Forests in Europe developed throughout the 1990s to become the European regional forest policy process – albeit having only achieved weak coordination by non-legally binding proposals. In 2009, the process was renamed ‘Forest Europe’, and in 2011 the decision was made by the European ministers responsible for forests to enter into negotiations on a legally binding instrument for European forests.

2. This has changed since 2005 when negotiations on a post-Kyoto agreement began and deforestation in developing countries became a central issue. In accordance with their general claim to protect the globe's remaining primary forests, environmental groups now support the inclusion of forests in international climate policy and a financial compensation of developing countries reducing their deforestation rates. However, they still oppose both ‘offsetting emissions’ by industrial countries by using reduced forest emissions in developing countries instead of implementing domestic policies and measures and proposals to modify agreed regulations for industrialized countries (Pistorius 2009).