Paper short abstract:

The project examines how actors in a land use conflict between limestone industry, nature conservation interests and local community on northern Gotland, articulate and use competing narratives of sustainability to sanction industrial exploitation or to protect the area as an upcoming national park.

Paper long abstract:

This study discusses how actors in a land use conflict on northern Gotland used stories of sustainability as an argument to legitimize industrial exploitation of the area or to protect it as an upcoming national park. In the conflict, plans for large-scale limestone mining collided with nature conservation interests and the local community. During the conflict, the site became an arena where hegemonic discourses on sustainability, industrial development and eco-modernity came to clash.

The conflict was called "Striden om Ojnareskogen" (The battle of Ojnare forest) and was one of similar conflicts in Sweden during the 2000s between expansive mining industry, nature conservation and local community. A background can be sought in the deregulation of Swedish mineral policy in a neoliberal direction since the 1990s.

The study examines how “sustainability stories” were articulated to influence the course of the conflict. Many actors became involved and vertical networks were formed between the local community, industrial interests, various regional and state authorities and levels of society in Sweden. The networks launched antagonistic narrative programs to promote own interests and to disqualifying others' activities and ways of thinking. In these competing narrative programs, the landscape's meaningful elements such as limestone, water and habitat became actants with discursive functions by being associated with aspects of sustainability.

The study's research material consists of court documents, media reporting and interviews of people who actively participated in the conflict. Theoretically, the networks' narrative programs are analysed with narrative theory and inspiration from political discourse theory and actor-network perspectives.