Learning to Adapt: A Swedish case study on adaptation of biodiversity management within Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA)

Sammanfattning: Achieving adaptation within an organisation occurs largely through the process of organisational learning. The identification of organisational learning cycles and the factors that influence an organisation’s adaptation can improve understanding of how organisations adapt to complex sustainability issues. To date, efforts to analyse the factors that affect organisational adaptation have not been researched extensively within the Swedish forest industry. In order to address this gap, an operationalization of the organisational adaptation model in a case study of a Swedish forestry actor, Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA), has been carried out. This study uses the model presented in Berkhout et al. (2006) on organisational adaptation to articulate the role of organisational learning in establishing and implementing adaptation measures for biodiversity management within SCA throughout the 1980s-1990s. It also identifies the factors that determined this process. There is evidence that two parallel organisational adaptation cycles occurred within SCA that shaped the emergence of two key adaptation options on biodiversity within the company, the Ecological Landscape Plan (ELP) and re-invention of SCA operations. Subsequently several factors were identified that affected this process of adaptation overtime including, mind-sets and values, employee skills, organisational culture and the context surrounding the company. This has implications for which adaptive measures may (or may not) be selected and carried out. Further research should be done to clarify which kind of innovations may be most effective to reduce the factors that act as barriers to organisational adaptation.