Abstract for: Searching for the magnificent mountain landscape – environmental management in the Swedish mountain areas

To reach a sustainable society where the environmental problems are solved, Sweden has formulated 16 Parliamentary Environmental Objectives. It is assumed that all sectors and stakeholders will take responsibility for reaching the national environmental objectives. The need to develop management tools for complex systems initiated a project to map structures and interactions between stakeholders and to analyse how processes within the objective influence governance and the ability to achieve desired outcomes. The project used system analysis and group based conceptual modelling included a social adaptive learning process. The research process involved 40 stakeholder representatives interacting over seven workshops. The diagrams were continuously and collectively peer-reviewed allowing all stakeholder attitudes to be obvious for the participants. The main findings were 1) the current focus of the MML objective on environmental sustainability was to narrow and that a broader perspective including social and economic sustainability was needed; 2) chosen indicators are not sufficiently comprehensive and only partially indicating if the objective is reached and the process of public participation has been dysfunctional; 3) the current management lack respect for local perspectives and 4) the locally perceived legitimacy of authorities is low due to previous actions and experiences.