Forestry in interaction. Shedding light on dynamics of public opinion with a praxeological methodology
Introduction
Forests are important and contested resources, not only in the economic sense but for society's diverse and at times contradictive needs (McDermott et al., 2010). Especially in densely populated areas, the diversity of interests occasionally takes the shape of a conflict (Konijnendijk, 2008; Gritten et al., 2012). One widespread discord around forest uses is grounded in the competing rationales of timber production versus nature conservation, the latter having developed into a major policy objective on regional, national, and international level in the last decades (Niemelä et al., 2005). The resulting complex network of regulations, gives ongoing occasion for negotiation and struggle about the legitimacy of forestry practices. While many of these conflicts have developed into fairly institutionalized processes with political and administrative agencies, NGOs and associations as routine actors (cf. Krott, 2005, pp. 69–149), the interest of the study at hand is in understanding a more recent and a less established frontline: regional conflicts between citizens and forestry administrations or forest owners when forest management is perceived to be in opposition to public expectations of recreation or nature conservation. In such cases, the ‘opponent’ to forestry practices is a heterogenous general public, comparatively unorganized, and accordingly difficult to grasp. Broader developments in forest policy leave their mark on such conflicts, e.g. a general commitment to the importance of nature conservation on the part of citizens, but they usually occur and evolve outside of political arenas. In Germany, several forestry administrations were shaken by conflicts of this kind in recent years. The instances are few when measured against the overall contentment with forestry, as several surveys have pointed out (cf. Bethmann and Wurster, 2016). But contextualizing them within Europe-wide tendencies for an erosion of trust in administrations and changing expectations of forests in urbanized societies, they demand administrative, political and scientific attention.
In several countries, politicians and administrations have begun to actively request social scientific support to facilitate foresighted management and conflict resolution with regard to demands of the general public and civil stakeholders.1 For some administrative goals, for example in the case of sustainable development, it is common practice to include the public in management decisions to some degree (Primmer and Kyllönen, 2006). Strategies range from incorporating evidence from social science research, to providing information for the public unilaterally, and to participatory committees with or without real political influence. In this context, the survey has become an important instrument to understand the public's relationship with forestry. But opinion surveys have limitations, especially when it comes to understanding challenges in the communication between forestry officials and citizens.
A growing corpus of literature on conflicts and participatory process sheds light on these blind spots (Eckerberg and Sandström, 2013). These studies show that the relationship to forests and opinions of forestry are dynamic phenomena that are partly shaped by communication and interaction with forestry representatives. Often, they mainly focus on procedural issues and put less effort into systemizing the attitudes citizens hold on the institutions they engage with. In the following section, we bring together insights from public opinion surveys as well as more process-oriented research into conflict and participation in forestry. From the literature, we bring out the argument that opinion is something that takes shape and is expressed situationally, and we suggest to explore the role of public opinion in forest conflicts as a dynamic object. After that, we unfold a methodology driven by a theoretical conception of interaction informed by the praxeological theory of American pragmatism. Specific methodological principles are defined so as to enable the analysis to establish a connection between the actions of conflict opponents and the contradictive worldviews that are documented within such actions. The methodology is put to practice with one case study from the Sociocultural Forest Monitoring research project (2015–2020), a study with a regional focus on forest-related conflicts in Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, funded and conducted by institution anonymized. The article concludes with an assessment of the knowledge to be gained from the conceptualization of citizens' relationships to forestry as dynamic opinion formation.
Section snippets
Understanding the public's relationship with forestry
With the paradigm of sustainable forest management (SFM), forestry institutions have incorporated the ideal of providing services for multiple needs and expectations of the societies they serve. Given the complexity and contradictions within the goal to provide public goods for all citizens, social conflicts over the appropriate objectives of forestry institutions are inevitable (Eckerberg and Sandström, 2013). The developments in some regions of the world have shown that such conflicts can
Methodology - a pragmatist approach
With our interest in dynamic processes and interaction in view, our research utilizes a mixed-method approach with qualitative methods at the core. It focuses on two types of processes: (1) instances of communication (e.g. public relation activities) and (2) instances of civic engagement (e.g. local initiatives founded in resistance against forest harvesting or clear-cutting). In each field, the exploration starts with one case, and while analyzing it, more cases are subsequently added so as to
Case portray and data corpus
After explaining the basic logic of the methods, we present results from one of our case studies so as to demonstrate how exactly our method design grasps complexities of meaning and process and to show what can be gained from this perspective. The case consists of several incidents related to a conflict on a thinning procedure in a protected landscape. While foresters and the majority of nature conservationists who comment on this conflict assess the thinning as an unproblematic, common
Concluding discussion
Epistemologically, the research presented here can be seen as part of the turn to practice theories in forest policy research (Arts et al., 2014, Arts et al., 2016; Behagel and Turnhout, 2017; Nicolini, 2016, Nicolini, 2017), with American pragmatism being a theory that draws attention to what people do, much more than what they say – or to how they say it, when one looks at talk as a social practice. It is less concerned with formal analysis, but with analyzing social structure and meaning
Acknowledgements
This project was funded by the Forest Research Institute Baden-Wuerttemberg, which is associated with the Ministry for Rural Affairs and Consumer Protection Baden-Wuerttemberg.
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