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We evaluate the ex ante efficiency of a major Swedish investment subsidy programme, the ‘local investment programme’ (LIP). The LIP, effective between 1998 and 2002, had parallel purposes: to step up the pace at which Sweden transforms into an ecologically sustainable society and to reduce unemployment. During the programme period, c670 million were granted to different municipal projects. We find that the marginal LIP subsidy to the largest beneficial environmental variable, reductions of carbon dioxide, does not vary significantly over projects, implying that LIP subsidy was efficiently allocated for such reductions. The beneficial variable with largest economic significance was, however, the employment variable. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a background to the SUFOR program, in this paper a short introduction to Swedish forestry is given, together with an overview of the sustainability debate in Sweden. The research carried through in the SUFOR program is concurrent with some of the main aspects of sustainability as interpreted here. Knowledge obtained through the program is identified to have a role as decision support for decision makers in Swedish forestry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local Agenda 21 (LA21) is committed to two types of goal: procedural goals substantiated primarily in the requirement to encourage greater participation in local decision making and substantive goals predominantly attached to the call for a sustainable development. In this article, we report on the LA21 processes of two communities, Helsingborg, Sweden, and Vienna, Austria. We analyse what kind of normative tension the two communities have experienced by concurrently striving for democracy and sustainability. We also discuss what impact the two LA21 processes have on local governance structures and what potentials for more fundamental system changes they hold. Our analysis shows that the challenge of actually reconciling possibly conflicting goals is far from easy. In Helsingborg, the apparent harmony of goals has been achieved partly by falling back on political rhetoric, partly by interpreting the two goals in a narrow way, i.e. sustainability policy has been reduced to environmental issues and citizen participation has been equated with ‘paternalistic’ consultation. The Viennese LA21 process has managed to implement the two goals in a more comprehensive way, but this has come at the cost of being marginalized by the central political actors. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses what it takes for a new discourse to acquire formative power all the way from the formulation of ideas to the institutionalisation of new practices. Starting from seemingly contradictory propositions in the literature on housing and environmental policy discourses, and combining these with a contextual rational action approach, the empirical analysis traces the fate of the new sustainable development discourse introduced across many policy sectors in Sweden after 1996, including housing. It is found that who introduces new discursive ideas is important for their formative power; discourse introductions by government induce shifts in thoughts and talk across sectors. How this is done is even more important; metaphors and story lines of already institutionalised discourses strengthen formative power. Furthermore, using distributive measures with some strings attached is found to be an effective use of power resources to gain institutionalisation of the new discourse. However, it is found that institutionalised discourses at the local implementing level provide hindrances to formative power reaching all the way to new practices. This is furthermore accentuated by inherent contradictions in the Swedish discourse, as it built on equalising sustainable development with ecological modernisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]