THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Our framework is designed to address the twin needs of descriptive and prescriptive analysis. The first need is met through a limited and selective appeal to the theory of historical materialism. Broadly conceived, this aims to explain ideas about legitimacy and right as resulting from historical class struggles. ^{Footnote 19} Class struggles originate with the enclosure, or privatization, of the common and the subsequent inequalities that emerge between those who lay claim to natural resources and those denied access to what was previously accessible to all. Classes struggle for control of the coercive powers of the state, according to which ownership may be legally assigned and re-assigned, promoting the interests of one class over another, capitalist over landed nobility, proletarian over capitalist. As conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, historical materialism operated with a monolithic conception of class—landowners, capitalists, proletarians—overlooking the nuances of intra-class, as opposed to inter-class, conflicts. Nonetheless, it sought to offer a descriptive analysis of how ownership changes over time as ascendant social classes establish enclosures of common resources—be it through privatization, patenting, or other means of moving control away from those concerned, ^{Footnote 20} like that of appropriation of local wildlife as global resources for a conservation and sustainability agenda. We contend that the present confluence of class interests between hunters and conservationists involves many nuances and internal class tensions insofar as both groups exhibit increasing socio-economic diversity, not least the case of “new” affluent hunters coming from cities and homes with urban-based values around nature conservation. However, the conflict between them still fits the historical materialist model of a competition for control of the state to advance their particular agendas concerning the assignment of ownership.

That said, historical materialism is also associated with claims that are prescriptive as well as descriptive. In regard to property rights, these prescriptive claims concern the desirability of some future restoration of the common, such as in eco-socialism. ^{Footnote 21} Here, a Marxian approach appeals to virtues of the common, quite distinct from those of ownership and possession, such as spontaneity and cooperativeness in a class-less, property-less society. Nonetheless, such prescriptive claims as may be derived from this approach are of questionable value. Our empirical study shows hunters do not truly aspire to any such restoration of the common. Instead, they express a strong desire for recognition and respect from the state for decidedly non-Marxist virtues of possession and pride. ^{Footnote 22}

To this extent, we turn to deliberative democracy to address the second of the twin needs—for a prescriptive analysis of a way forward beyond ongoing conflict over who controls the state. Deliberative democracy is concerned with improving collective decision making, emphasizing the right, opportunity, and capacity of anyone who is subject to a collective decision to participate in consequential deliberation influencing the decision outcome. ^{Footnote 23} From the point of view of this study, its relevance lies on its very different attitude toward class conflict and the state. Contrary to historical materialism, classes do not simply vie for control of the state and its coercive powers to advance their interests. Instead, deliberative democrats see a positive role for the state in providing neutral deliberative fora in which competing class interests may be mediated and adjudicated. Deliberative democracy thus also rejects the eco-socialist ideal of a restored common, seeking instead a standpoint of state neutrality with respect to questions of common interest for hunters and conservationists across class lines. ^{Footnote 24}

It does so by creating the kind of deliberative spaces that shift the focus of class antagonism from narrow questions of ownership—game of hunters or pets of state—to complex, overlapping relations of shared political responsibility for nature and wildlife. Here, the deliberative virtues of taking the perspective of others, critically assessing their positions against contrary points of view and the best available scientific information, are prescriptions that replace the quasi-aristocratic virtues of possession and pride claimed by hunters, which are inevitably tied to their partisan class interests and may or may not reflect the actual interests of wildlife. Likewise, such deliberative virtues may enable hunters to more effectively challenge the positions of the new conservation elites, which they believe to be merely sentimental and ill-informed urban biases at odds with the realities of rural life. ^{Footnote 25}

Regarding our use of the concept of class, we understand this primarily in terms of political, rather than economic, subordination, although the two frequently interact. Here, we stipulate that a class privilege—or superior positionality within the extant social order—is achieved when one social faction succeeds in effectively co-opting the coercive powers of the state to advance its particular interests and agenda, at the expense of other factions with conflicting interests and agendas. But the subordination of one class by another is not always reducible to economics, as typically stressed in the Marxian approach. It might also be a function of the elite class gaining discursive control over deliberative processes for evaluating competing claims to justice and validating competing claims to knowledge. ^{Footnote 26} Indeed, hunters cannot easily be parsed as a class in the economic sense, given that contemporary hunters are diverse and many are reasonably affluent members of society. ^{Footnote 27} As noted, class tensions are manifest within the hunting community itself (as between “meat” hunters and sportsmen and between urban hunting “clients” and rural “lifers”), but for two reasons these are of secondary importance in the current political debate on wolves. First, this class division is simply less pronounced than in many other countries. Second, hunters arguably transcend internal economically configured class tensions to form a coalition mobilized against what they perceive as the far greater threat of external class struggles. These struggles operate on the basis of politically—as discursively disadvantaging in the debate—rather than economically subordinating hunters, even if hunters also contend that wildlife conservation involves the simultaneous economic disenfranchisement of the countryside.

Still, given that their subordination turns primarily on the principle of political disempowerment of an economically diverse demographic, this weakens any claim they might have that they are a heterogeneously economically subordinate class unto themselves or a discriminated against minority whose livelihoods and lifestyles are fundamentally at stake with protective legislation, as Sarah Fenstemaker supports in arguing for the Hopi’s rights to continue to hunt eagles. ^{Footnote 28} Although their livelihoods are (most of the time) not at stake, then, hunters often position wolf conservation as a direct attack on property rights and the right of hunters to cultural self-preservation and maintenance of cultural heritage more indirectly. ^{Footnote 29} Cultural heritage, as we will see, comprises culturally shaped landscapes and traditional ways of hunting rather than the typical physical property categories listed in the 1970 UNESCO Convention. ^{Footnote 30} It can be noted, however, that in the context of the ongoing legal debate whether hunting prohibitions violate the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage or the cultural rights to lifestyle stipulated by the European Court of Human Rights, recreational Western hunters rarely successfully qualify as a distinct subculture in danger of cultural extinction analogous to an indigenous community that can make these appeals. ^{Footnote 31}

Finally, as a point of clarification, we stress that our approach is based in social and political theory and not in legal theory. Our concern is not with legality—who has legal rights of ownership—but with achieving legitimacy in the process of deliberating rival class claims to ownership of common fauna. To this extent, it is not our intention in this article to pioneer a new legal category of ownership, as much as to begin laying out the conditions for achieving legitimacy in the complex democratic process of giving voice to conflicting interests regarding such ownership, without privileging the voices of conservationists over hunters, or vice versa, and using the power of the state to reinforce any one or other positionality in this process. Legitimacy is achieved when the powers of the state are employed to ensure processual neutrality with respect to class positionalities in the deliberation of collective decision outcomes.

DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

The purpose of this brief section is to establish that the subsequent empirical reflections of contemporary Swedish hunters are best understood as the most recent iteration in an ongoing historical dialectic between a subaltern and dominant or elite class. Indeed, hunters’ reflections on the importance of virtue in wildlife stewardship, their resentments toward the state and their class antagonists who co-opt its power to advance narrow elite interests, and their attempts to reconcile private and common are all historically prefigured phenomena. The class antagonists have changed, but the role of the state in promoting some class interests over others, and the aspiration of hunters for state recognition and respect, remain largely the same.

The importance of the appeal to virtue in justifying claims to ownership and exclusive access to wildlife is prefigured in hunting in early modern Sweden having become a royal recreation associated with elite prerogative of masculinity and adventure, reflecting parallel trends in Europe. ^{Footnote 32} Hunting thus detached from subsistence was increasingly justified as promoting these paradigmatically aristocratic virtues. To commoners, the reframing of some forms of hunting as recreational caused deep resentment about the state’s narrowly self-interested appropriations of the common as extending legal protection to “things of pleasure.” ^{Footnote 33} Clearly, commoners were not profiting from these hunting pursuits of the privileged few, while believing they had the right to enjoy access to the common on a basis of equality with their peers.

Commoners resented the statutes of the 1600s that consolidated the attractive and valuable game, such as the esteemed moose hunting, ^{Footnote 34} with social elites, while leaving more arduous predator control practices to the lower classes. The burden of wolf culling, for example, was left as a legally stipulated duty to commoners when it was the nobility who most benefited from such hunts in keeping high game numbers up. Wolf battues, in Roger Bergström, Karin Dirke, and Kjell Dannell’s words, “were a useful way of controlling, and subordinating commoners.” ^{Footnote 35} Resentful of their subordination through wolf battues, commoners voiced their dissatisfaction by misbehaving, for example, by showing up late or ill-equipped. ^{Footnote 36} Their conduct was a testament to the unpopularity of the state hunting administrators (jägaristaten) who initiated and oversaw the raids, as Ulf Nyrén contends: “The same state servants who routinely called the public before courts over various poaching and tree felling offenses demanded that this same public would obey orders by participating in wolf hunts in all kinds of weather and across all kinds of untraversable landscapes.” ^{Footnote 37}

Class antagonism over wildlife became most pronounced during the Nordic War in the early 1700s. Never more reliant on the public’s acceptance of taxes for the purpose of waging war, the state saw an increase in objections and dissent. Poaching of wildlife became less sporadic and individual and more organized, particularly with respect to moose hunts. ^{Footnote 38} Indeed, the state failed to deliver on its martial promises, while exacting harsh tolls on the subordinate classes. In addition to poaching, commoners refused to pay taxes, circulated rumors, and deserted military ranks. ^{Footnote 39} In this respect, they were critical of what they saw as administrative infringements of various kinds, facilitating radical appropriations of their goods and resources, such as horses, monies, or manpower. ^{Footnote 40} Parallel to the more familiar cases of protest among the English, ^{Footnote 41} state regulation of wildlife in Sweden was unpopular both because of its toll on the lower classes and because of their increasing suspicion of the class who administered them. ^{Footnote 42} Both legal and illegal measures were now sought by the peasantry to regain the right to hunt, and they were gradually more successful under the Age of Liberty (1718–72), during which Swedish commoners sought progressive social change on multiple fronts.

Limited concessions were granted to commoners to hunt in the coming years, even though these were primarily motivated by the rationale of getting commoners to agree to an upcoming war tax. In 1789, however, the right to hunt was unequivocally granted to all those who owned land. This meant that only a small class of landless tenants were without access to game. Predictably, the public’s right to hunt led to rapidly deteriorating wildlife stocks, necessitating new prohibitions on hunting practices in the decades that followed—1808, 1825, and 1864. With the formation of the Swedish Hunting Association in 1830, however, Swedish hunters gradually came to self-style themselves as the owners of common wildlife in a manner not dissimilar to the Vermont hunters, described by Marc Boglioli, who exhibited excessive possessiveness toward deer as “their” game, which they had stewarded and saved from near extinction. ^{Footnote 43}

Nonetheless, we stress here that these Swedish hunters did not properly reclaim their customary rights of the poor to access the common—or, in Marx’s memorable phrase, the “alms of nature”—as antecedent to law. ^{Footnote 44} Instead, they asserted a legal right of ownership and control over wildlife more akin to those mandates of the modern state that had once reserved access to common Swedish game for nobility and crown. The Swedish Hunting Association is in fact often criticized for privileging the landed elite among hunters. We shall later argue that this historical supererogation of ownership duties from their class antagonists manifests itself in the “quasi-aristocratic virtues” that Swedish hunters claim for themselves. These are not virtues of the common, as espoused by Marx, such as sharing, spontaneity, and cooperation but, rather, virtues of pride: freedom with responsibility, independent judgment, and personal initiative. They are above all celebrations of property rights, forming a defensive shield around hunting as a sovereign jurisdiction into which new laws about public goods like wildlife should not penetrate. ^{Footnote 45}

We argue this dialectic of supererogation with respect to the ownership of Swedish wildlife goes some considerable way towards explaining the current form that class antagonism has taken among hunters, as revealed in our interview study. This is class antagonism not toward the old elite of Swedish nobles but, rather, toward what is seen as a new urban-rooted elite of conservationists and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), co-opting the powers of the state to impose a conservation agenda on hunters. ^{Footnote 46} Indeed, such a top-down agenda of the new elite is experienced by the hunters as wresting from them the unequivocal right of hunting and stewardship transferred to them from the old elite of nobility and crown by the nineteenth-century Swedish state. The focal point is above all the sudden criminalization of wolf culling in the countryside.

EMPIRICAL FINDINGS OF THE INTERVIEW STUDY

We now proceed to the empirical findings of our interview study, presenting (1) the hunters’ reflections on the virtues of hunting; (2) their resentments toward the state; (3) their present-day class antagonists; as well as (4) their attempts to reconcile the private and common where the property of wildlife and, in particular, wolves, are concerned. All quotations below are from our hunter respondents, unless otherwise stated.

Attitudes toward the State

Because this research explicitly set out from an observed crisis of legitimacy on the part of the regulatory regime, there was no shortage of regime-critical opinions by the hunters interviewed. These centered on the limits of actual participation by hunters over wolf conservation policy, prompting the sober reflection that “the state has decided how it’s to be managed,” without input from those affected by its policy. They also centered on the state’s incompetence before administrating hunting issues and on the state’s lack of recognition of hunters’ contributions. First, respondents presented criticisms that centered on the state’s fundamental lack of recognition—indeed, ingratitude—for hunters’ contributions to society. Instead of having their customary vehicular-injured tracking and euthanization duties duly acknowledged as a public service to traffic safety, the state failed to appreciate the full significance of this contribution. This was manifested when Dalarna hunters embarked on several consecutive strikes of this practice to leverage the state to change wolf conservation policy. Moreover, because the wildlife that suffered from this activity were run-of-the-mill game stocks, such as deer, and not the charismatic, state-sponsored wolves, the strikes were unsuccessful in compelling change from the state.

Second, hunters showcased an often profound mistrust of the state and its agenda where wildlife was concerned. Mistrust toward the regulatory regime increased the further away from the hunter the authority was located: “The further away you get the less confidence you have in these institutions, especially the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.” The EU, in particular, was seen as a supranational regulatory actor who encroached not only on national sovereignty but also on local resources, intangible cultural property, and landscapes:

“In my opinion the EU interferes a bit much in local affairs.”

“No one really understands why the EU has to meddle with what we hunt here.”

“I imagine most people are bothered by [the] EU’s interfering in their hunting.”

When respondents were asked about their relationship to, and trust in, state administrative bodies that managed wildlife, regionally and nationally, it became clear that a principal source of resentment toward civil servants and state managers was their armchair-based alienation from the repercussions of wildlife conservation. The “theoretical backgrounds” and “practically speaking no experience” of civil servants was an affront when such people micro-managed hunting matters. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), in particular, was said to comprise everyone from “a lot of ‘nature-lovers’ … who are perhaps a bit biased on certain issues” to “ideologies” that were working to put a spanner in the works, operating, in one respondent’s words, from the dubious point of departure of restricting hunters’ freedom: “How should we infringe on the rest of society’s liberties to undertake protective measures for this species?” As an institution, the SEPA was much criticized for effecting a political mess and for showing “time and again they can’t handle” wildlife management by veering into straight conservation.

While regional authorities tasked with wildlife management were on the whole better regarded than the administrators at SEPA, especially where such individuals had hunting backgrounds themselves, respondents still emphasized a gap between “polished” civil servants and the common hunter or farmer. These civil servants were jokingly said to have “sold their soul” in working for the state. Echoing the role of the unpopular regional wildlife and hunting administration at the time—the jägeristaten in historical times—a new breed of zealous state-employed nature inspectors now counteracted the hunters’ freedom in the woods, making them feel monitored and policed, especially in the wolf-dense county of Dalarna. ^{Footnote 56} Sometimes this was overt in the administrative authority’s positioning of wildlife monitoring cameras that seemed, to two respondents interviewed in this study, to be more about capturing hunters’ misconduct on tape than about the wildlife.

Third, hunters accused the state of prioritizing the agenda of conservation over rural economic investment and social welfare. Several hunters presented a near-apocalyptic vision of the state’s “systematic devastation of the countryside,” where factories were closed down or workers were let go to make room for wolf conservation or livestock producers were forced to give up because of repeated carnivore attacks on their herds, causing the prized open pastoral landscape to regrow into a forest full of wolves where “no more moose [were] left”: ^{Footnote 57}

“They’ve let go 500 people. I’m not one of them, but I’m still affected … it’s the largest company here so it’s really difficult.”

The state’s co-optation by conservationists was seen not merely on the level of granting them disproportionate uptake in the debate, or affirming the legitimacy of their discourse above that of hunters,’ ^{Footnote 7} but it was also economic to many of the hunters interviewed in this study. Respondents were critical of the substantial state grants that animal rights ENGOs received annually, often to the point of being more or less fully subsidized (as one observed, albeit only partly correctly, of the Swedish Association for Nature Protection and the Anti-Poaching Unit). ^{Footnote 58} Hunters, meanwhile, pay a fee that goes into a wildlife management research stipend. As such, some respondents complained that grants from this stipend often go directly toward funding wolf-promoting projects by SEPA:

“So this money is taken from hunters … why are hunters a unique group forced to pay for this?”

There was the sense among a majority of respondents that, while the government had turned its back on the countryside, “these wolves can cost just about however much they want.” Not only did wolves divert resources from the needs and interests of hunters, but their conservation represented the erosion of a unique cultural heritage on the part of Nordic hunters—that of free-roaming coursing by hunting dogs. In fact, one of the principal grievances of hunters in this study, as elsewhere, was that their cherished custom of hunting with dogs is no longer possible in wolf-dense regions. ^{Footnote 59} As one individual argued, “[o]f course there’ll be confrontation [with the wolf] when our hunting today is some 90 percent dog-based.” Hunters are deeply attached to their hounds, which they view as family members more so than property: “Take your dog away from you and I think the hatred is pretty much comparable as someone taking your wife away from you.” Wolf territoriality means attacks on dogs are a common occurrence where only about one in every four dog survives. ^{Footnote 60} In this sense, the pets of conservationists could not co-exist with the dogs of hunters and, by extension, the rich tradition of loose dog hunting (fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Hounds like dachshunds, for example, hunt game over large stretches rather than course, flush, or put the game to bay, making them vulnerable to attacks in wolf territories. Courtesy of Nils von Essen.

Fourth and finally, hunters’ resentment toward the state was also grounded in its perceived persecution of hunters over various misdemeanors, not unlike the old jägeristaten—a wildlife agency that was seen as a military institution in civil disguise. ^{Footnote 61} Today, the agenda of nature inspectors, environmental prosecutors, and militant animal rights and ENGOs has steered law enforcement in the direction of prioritizing wildlife crimes. One clear point of injustice was in the state’s unduly harsh punishment for illegal hunting—often over forms that were simply the continuity of customary lifestyle practices:

“Seems like there’s very severe punishments for [illegal hunting]. Surprisingly hard compared to a lot of other stuff.”

“The large carnivores is where the big punishments are.”

Such enforcement and punishment were speculated to be employed in large part to send a message to hunters to stay in line. For example, the fact that any investigations into a hunter’s conduct in relation to wolves took so long sent a message to hunters that their licenses and weapons could be seized almost indefinitely, effectively precluding them from pursuing their hunting lifestyle for as long as the attorney deemed appropriate. There was a disproportionate emphasis on enforcing wildlife regulation, to the point where otherwise police-neglected areas saw “CIA style criminal investigation … as soon as a wolf’s in the picture.” Resentment over the state shifting its police force to diligently enforce green laws in a community where most police contact was otherwise initiated by citizens is now commonly documented in outport communities of hunters. ^{Footnote 62} It suggests legal systems never dispense a neutral justice but carry out arrests, investigations, and sentences as part of a political struggle. ^{Footnote 63}

PRESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS: FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Our descriptive analysis clearly shows that hunters—at least rhetorically—construct themselves as the underdog in the economic sense, in addition to emphasizing their discursive and criminal justice disempowerment as well as a broader political disenfranchisement aimed at devastating the countryside. Indeed, they construct themselves as the victims of rural disinvestment and the prioritization by elites of the needs of wolves over rural residents for hospital beds. In rallying these grievances, hunters effectively collapse the socio-economic diversity within the hunting community (as between tenants and landowners). They do so, in part, because such tensions are clearly secondary to the threat of an external class struggle over wildlife. With this in mind, we now build upon the descriptive framework of historical materialism by considering prescriptive responses to the present-day resentments of hunters toward the state for promoting the conservationist agenda of new elites of ENGOs, which have effectively replaced the old elite of nobility and crown as class antagonists of Swedish hunters.

What are the ways forward in such a prescriptive analysis? We believe it requires moving beyond the Marxian paradigm insofar as this fails to capture the normative aspirations of contemporary Swedish hunters. Indeed, it presupposes what we consider to be a false dichotomy. Responsible stewardship is either thought to require private ownership and possessiveness by a particular class, exemplifying virtues of pride and independence, or it requires common ownership without social distinction, exemplifying virtues of spontaneity and cooperation. Both poles of this dichotomy are problematic. On the one hand, private ownership and possessiveness are deeply tied to the defense of class privilege. This means that the question of what is best for common fauna is inexorably subsumed by the question of what is best for the class claiming rightful possession based upon its purported virtues of pride. This is strongly manifested, for example, in the attempt by English upper-class fox hunters to appropriate the fox as its cultural property. ^{Footnote 65} On the other hand, common ownership raises concerns about a potential tragedy of the commons in which the ascription of responsibility to all risks the outcome in which responsibility is taken by none. ^{Footnote 66}

To this extent, we advocate turning from the deep historical tie between responsibility and ownership exposed by historical materialism to the relationship between responsibility and democratic process. This diverts attention from class struggles between hunters and conservationists toward focusing on the role of the state as mediator. Class antagonism in regard to wildlife (and, indeed, generally) is a function of one social class co-opting the powers of the state to advance its interests over those of rival classes. But such antagonism should be seen as a failure of democratic legitimacy—that is, a failure to achieve agreement across class lines on the rightful use of state coercion in order to achieve a purpose of common interest of society. Based on the findings here, the state has been unable to facilitate a neutral resolution of class antagonism over common Swedish fauna through any of its existing decision-making arrangements. Indeed, the 2009 innovation of the Game Management Delegations in Sweden ostensibly answered hunters’ calls for more decentralized wolf management. ^{Footnote 67} However, this has also fallen victim to the same degree of co-optation and “mud-slinging” to the point where it is reproducing the fragmentation of the common. ^{Footnote 68} Some critics suggest that in delegating decision-making power to the local level, wildlife management has been co-opted by hunters, who are over-represented on these delegations, even though the hunters also appear unsatisfied with the delegation because decisions are overruled by ENGOs at later stages. ^{Footnote 69} This development shows that attempts at accommodating hunters’ desire for political recognition as rightful owners and stewards of the unmanufactured common risk becoming little more than a wistful desire for hunters to co-opt the process for themselves and their agenda.

Such a tug-of-war between classes begs the question: how and in what forms may a resolution of class antagonism over common Swedish fauna be approximated? What exactly should the role of the state and the role of hunters be in securing a standpoint of class neutrality that can emphasize the creation of unbiased processes and procedures of arbitration? Leaving this in the hands of the state, even in a new wildlife management agency, as suggested by some of our respondents, is clearly insufficient. It would appeal to what contemporary Marxists often denounce as the social democratic compromise of the twentieth century. ^{Footnote 70} Here, the social democratic state took on the role of umpire, mediating between the rival class interests of capital and labor. Because of the record of failure on the part of the Swedish state to create such neutral processes, we believe there may be time for a more radical alternative to level the playing field.

One such alternative for neutral mediation may be found in deliberative democracy. In particular, critical, emancipatory, deliberative mini-publics may be initiated by particular stakeholders who believe their position has not been fairly represented before the mass public. Rather than the state issuing a judgment that could be construed as biased toward either of the interested factions at any given time, responsibility for adjudication is turned over to a random selection of citizens who consider the perspective of the disaffected faction that initiated the deliberation process. Neutrality is thus achieved through the random selection of disinterested citizens presenting to the mass public a deliberative judgment not only reached in light of their critical assessment of competing stakeholder perspectives but also critically tested against the common values and consideration of best practice scientific information considered relevant by the citizens. Facilitators of the process must be external persons, actors tied neither to the state nor to any competing class.

In the case of a mini-public initiated by disaffected Swedish hunters, this would mean that the latter could no longer claim justification for exercising their independent judgment and initiative on the basis of their purported virtues. Indeed, their virtue-based claims to superior judgment as stewards would be critically tested against best practice scientific information concerning the interests and welfare of protected wildlife. In other words, the common good of wildlife would have to be considered independently of the (class) interests of competing social factions. The hunters’ own reflections elucidated some potential for cultivating such class-transcending deliberative processes about the common, although hunters primarily phrased this in terms of calling for fora in which the full spectrum of rationality could be brought forth, including hunters’ simultaneous positions as nature lovers, academics, and stewards.

Nonetheless, important questions remain concerning the best institutional design for mini-publics in order to guarantee their neutrality with respect to particular factions and the proper scope of mini-public judgments. While the hunters saw the potential for transcending domains in the commoning of wildlife, their protectionist quasi-aristocratic virtues present a challenge to the establishment of any such processes. This could be seen, for example, in the Swedish Hunting Association’s rejection of the proposal for “community agoras” for wildlife management in 2010, on the basis that it was dangerous for hunters to relinquish any sort of “control” to those who did not own land. ^{Footnote 71} Rejecting this proposal, an opportunity was prematurely lost to try out a deliberative approach where state institutions played a backseat supportive role to make room for the substantive deliberation of issues, rather than promoting certain preordained positions of participants.

The key point here is that the optimal design for impartial arbitration between opposing factions is one that is sufficiently emancipated from the state and yet receives some sort of constitutional protection and uptake. We see two principal reasons from our findings as to why this deliberative space needs to be appropriately balanced in terms of emancipation from, and protection by, the state. First, hunters are not likely to come to the table for anything that is too far from “freedom with responsibility.” Second, the Swedish immemorial “freedom to roam” may be said to provide a uniquely promising basis for building upon public access and responsibility taking for the commons. Indeed, this establishes the ideal access to, and responsibility for, the common already valorized as a public right controlled by no class interests, which the state must protect. Inasmuch as the ideal of common responsibility embodied in freedom to roam is allowed to undergird deliberation, it could provide an element of autonomy that is much sought after, motivating hunters’ participation.

In meeting the challenges to our proposal for critical mini-publics, it could still be asked whether the judgments provided by mini-publics are to be merely recommendations to the mass public on whether or not to issue hunting licenses or should they instead result in legally binding decisions that permit or prohibit, for example, protective wolf culling in particular municipalities. Should mini-public judgments be restricted to meta-questions about the legitimacy of hunting generally and its impact on common European fauna, which are questions that might engage the citizens of other EU countries as well as Swedes? However, it is not our intention to address these questions here.

Instead, our purpose is only to point toward mini-publics as a plausible deliberative democratic alternative to ongoing class warfare in wildlife management controversies. It is an alternative that could disentangle ownership of wildlife from class privilege, demonstrating to hunters that rather than evoke their quasi-aristocratic virtues of property, they too would be better served by a commoning of public resources. Mini-publics could provide the foundational element for an ongoing democratic exercise to cultivate a civic virtue of responsibility taking, even when there are not immediate benefits in terms of economic self-interest and private ownership of the kind purported above. Indeed, they do so by addressing the central problem of class conflict in the present context of discussion—that is, not just the economic but also the discursive disadvantage and political disempowerment of rural hunters as the new subordinate, or “lower,” class.