MultiForSe - Multi-use forestry, private forest ownerships, and social learning networks. Approaching family forest owners as grassroots agents for alternative forest management.

Alternative forest stewardship methods have the potential to diversify primary production and provide a wider variety of income opportunities in rural regions while also improving a wide range of environmental aspects.

Individuals and families own slightly more than half of Sweden’s productive forests, which makes them a key driver of decision making for implementing alternative management.

Although forest management practices in Sweden are embedded in a large, established industry with a high degree of inertia, a recent movement is picking up momentum in which Swedish family forest owners are venturing into new spaces of forest uses and management methods outside the status quo.

Swedish family forest owners are at the center of a renewed interest in multi-use forestry (mångbruk), an umbrella term for a variety of non-commercial forest uses as well as new ways of using and managing forests, ranging from small volume wood products to launching forest-based enterprises in the service sector.

This research project investigates how the social learning networks that facilitate processes of small-scale change in forest use already underway can be leveraged to accelerate the adoption of alternative forest management methods.

By focusing on Swedish family forest owners as grass roots agents catalyzing management transitions, we assess the effects and benefits of alternative forest stewardship practices and the impacts they have on sustaining rural livelihoods at localized scales.