Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Human intervention in forests such as clearcut forestry have a negative impact on water quality and biodiversity. To maintain water quality and its biological values a commonly used method is to leave trees and shrubs closest to the water, in so called a buffer zone. For riparian buffers to maximize their crucial services, buffer zone widths of at least 30 m have been recommended by research. However, in Sweden, riparian buffers are much thinner, especially along small streams, which rarely have buffers over 5 m. To comprehend the underlying factors for the miss match, the focus of this thesis was to analyze both the Swedish buffer zone policy and how major forestry actors had interoperated the policy. The analysis of the actor’s interoperations was done through analyze the actor’s internal guidelines for buffer zone management. The result indicates that the prevailing policy mix in Sweden, allows actors the flexibility to interpret the policy in accordance with their specific objectives, rather than aligning with evidence-based research. The analysis of the actor’s interoperations supports the results of the policy analysis but do also show that the interoperations of the buffer zone policy vary between actors, while some actors do not establish internal guidelines, which can explain the variation in buffer zone implementation in Sweden.