On The Side of the Forest Owner: : A Discourse Analysis of the Swedish Reception of the EU ForestStrategy for 2030

Sammanfattning: The new EU Forest Strategy for 2030, one of the flagship initiatives of the European Green Deal, has put EU forest policy in a new expansionary phase with ambitious goals for future forest management in Member States. This thesis analyzes contestation over the EU Forest Strategy for 2030 in Sweden to understand how discursive representations of forests are interlinked with justice perceptions. By utilizing poststructuralist discourse theory and the logics framework, and analyzing EU forest policy documents, Swedish parliamentary debates, and interviews with Swedish forest stakeholders, this thesis shows how sustainable forest management functions as a floating signifier and how different discursive understandings of this concept leads to different understandings of justice in forest management and thus how a just transition in forestry should look like. In the Swedish reception of the new Strategy, a commodity discourse and a conservation discourse could be identified where both highlighted the importance of the private forest owner in relation to justice perceptions in Sweden. The results show how the discourses attempt to invest the role of private forest owners with different meanings. Thus, this thesis contributes to the literature on just transitions by showing how justice perceptions are discursively interlinked with understandings of the role of forests, and how political contestation over this takes place.