Although wolf recolonization can be considered a success in terms of population increase and geographical dispersal, the return of grey wolves Canis lupus to rural central Sweden has caused frustration and discontent among local stakeholders. Farmers and hunters living in -or adjacent to -wolf territories perceive the political decision to support wolf recovery as intruding on local lives and restricting opportunities for small-scale farming and hunting. h ey feel that decision-makers have left the consequences of wolf recovery policies unaddressed. To overcome the failure of previous policies and increase local consensus, in October 2009 the Swedish parliament passed a resolution concerning the introduction of licensed hunting on wolves as a measure expected to promote local acceptance and facilitate dialogue among diff erent parties. In doing so, the Parliament delegated to the regional authorities the responsibility to organize, coordinate and implement licensed hunting in the administrative counties concerned.According to Swedish wolf hunting regulations, the regional authorities are to be involved not only in the achievement of primary policy goals, but are also expected to overcome antagonism and confl ict through collaboration. Questioning the normative idea which suggests that public managers are expected simply to implement national legislation at the local level, this paper argues that managers create practices and establish routines that enable them to cope with problems related to the realization of collaborative management. h rough a combination of participant observations and semi-structured interviews conducted with authorities and fi eld-staff in four administrative counties during the implementation of licensed hunting, this paper concludes that in order to understand how collaborative management of natural resources works, greater attention has to be directed to the way public managers organize their activities, how they cope with their mandate and how they themselves relate to networks of actors.

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Frontline bureaucrats are positioned at the interface between citizens and the state.They convert political resolution into action and in effect form the core of many public decisions through interaction and communication with both the recipients of those decisions and upper management levels that initiate them. However, dilemmas often arise when frontline bureaucrats attempt to translate political goals and strategies into local administrative praxis. The case of large carnivore management in Sweden will be used to demonstrate the insuperable difficulties that can arise when managers simultaneously need to balance the bureaucratic tasks of planning, executing, and evaluating performed decisions with attending to calls for increased responsiveness to public values in order to improve the delivery of service. This responsiveness is typically reflected through the new principles of public participation and collaboration, which are added to the bureaucracy to support the integration of broader sets of interests, experiences, and knowledge. In such an environment, the work of frontline managers becomes even more crucial in order to balance and align policy goals with the need to enhance public involvement. Our study reveals that in striving to meet the formal policy requirement to implement and lead collaboration (which in turn creates the central dilemma that concerns us here) managers develop strategies to secure effectiveness rather than responsiveness.Actually, they have few possibilities to do, otherwise when the latest policy edict clearly instructs the authorities to oversee the effective implementation and achievement of goals, leaving little opportunity to pursue genuine collaboration.