Changes in Norwegian forest policies: what are the effects of the international forest regime complex?

Abstract

An increasing complexity is seen in global governance systems for forests, with multiple policy processes providing binding and non-binding commitments and partly conflicting objectives. This paper intends to contribute to clarifying domestic influences of global initiatives, by an exploratory contrasting of two alternative analytical perspectives. For the first perspective, regime effects, two cases of policy changes in Norway revealed variation in effects depending on the scope of analysis and reference points used for measurement. Compared to a situation with no regime, an effect is revealed for the climate regime, while for biodiversity, the effect is uncertain. For problem-solving achievements, both cases of policy change indicate difficulties in determining effects, due to ambiguity in regime objectives. The initial contrasting of regime effects with global governance influences, the second perspective, find that these are incompatible concepts, with the governance influences encompassing broader sources of influences and their dynamic interactions. The explorations point to the need for clarity in what is the topic under study (effect of one or more regimes, or governance influences) and to the analytical delimitations (regime obligations, process-generated effects of regime, broader regime consequences, or governance influences). Finally, promising topics for extending our understanding of national–global interactions are identified.

Keywords:

• biodiversity
• climate mitigation
• conflicting objectives
• forest governance
• forest protection

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Arild Underdal and participants at the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference 2013 for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Constructive comments by two anonymous reviewers are also appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.