Presentation short abstract

Our study in Öland, Sweden examines how Swedish national policies and EU finance have ‘silenced’ multifunctional landscapes with farmers’ relational values lost within dominant production values, through critical discursive analyses of policies and media and dialogues with diverse local actors.

Presentation long abstract

The “Mittlandet” in Öland is a heterogeneous mixed landscape of smallholder farming, grazing areas and high biodiversity forests. Continued grazing in wooded grasslands and forest management is a long cultural practice and considered necessary to maintain biodiversity and heritage, but the smallholder mosaics are not aligned with Swedish and EU subsidies that are only targeted for either production or conservation.

We carried out critical discursive analyses of Swedish biodiversity strategy and print media, and examined financial subsidies flowing into the region to identify what types of farming are considered as politically viable in rural landscapes, and what opportunities are available for farmers and other actors to be nature-inclusive in their activities. The dominant policy narrative separates forests and agriculture as distinct systems, where both systems are production spaces for economic profitability, and legitimized as necessary for maintaining biodiversity and cultural heritage.

Through a series of participatory workshops and dialogues for co-producing knowledge and action with the Mittlandet landscape at the core, we examined how diverse actors relate to farming, forests and nature in different ways, as managers, farmers and stewards. The engaged process brought out ‘unusual’ dialogues in how issues of landscape governance are normally discussed and highlighted relational values such as sense of place and care for the Mittlandet. Farmers feel a sense of disquiet that their landscape knowledge, practices and culture remain silenced in policies and subsidies, and practice everyday resistance to counter what is perceived as unjust policies or unnecessary bureaucracies.