The Swedish forest policies have earlier mainly been focused on two goals: production and environment. The production goal aims to benefit the economical gains from forestry while the environmental goal primarily aims to shield the ecological values of the forest. With the introduction of the Swedish environmental code and the environmental objectives it was made clear that the overall objective for Swedish community development, including the forestry sector, is sustainable development. Sustainable development includes supporting economic, ecologic as well as social values of which the latter seems to have been forgotten in the forestry sector. This was recently brought to attention to the sector and the debate how to handle the social values is now ongoing. The legislator has not been unaware of the social values since they have since long been at least somewhat included in the preliminary works. With the impending introduction of a Swedish national forest programme the platform to integrate the social values of the forest into Swedish forestry seems to appear. Also reviewing the legal structure concerning forest is necessary, among other things the forestry act should be repealed and the environmentally concerned codes should be in the environmental act. Codes regarding the forest sector should be in a separate act.

As the effects of climate change worsen, the role and importance of forests in climate mitigation strategies seem to be growing. However, key actors have different views of how the forests should be used in order to curb the consequences of climate change. The future use of forest will therefore depend on these actors’ ability to realize their visions in the political arena. This thesis sets out to investigate how and to what extent a certain type of actor, in this case interest groups, influences forest policy. This is accomplished through a qualitative content analysis of the process toward Sweden’s first national forest program, using preference attainment as the theoretical approach to measure the influence of each interest group. The main finding is that interest groups representing economic values had a larger amount of influence on the policy-making process than interest groups representing environmental values. The study’s primary contribution to the interest group research field is hence empirical.