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This paper contributes to the current discussion on whether ‘soft’ regulation actually influences policy outcomes by examining the effects of national policy instruments on municipal climate and energy planning. Sweden has experienced shifts in the incentive context over the last decades complementing soft planning regulations with stringent conditions for getting national economic support to local energy and climate action. We hypothesize that when soft regulations are surrounded by detailed conditions for getting state support, there will be higher degrees of local institutionalization of climate and energy strategies. The importance of economic support as part of national policy is confirmed by evidence from local energy and climate strategies and from interviews with local decision-makers. We also find that specific municipal features such as earlier municipal engagement in national support programs and relevant inter-municipal networks function as drivers for the institutionalization of local action.

Individual local governments are key players in Sweden's strategy for climate adaptation but their authority does not match the scale of climate change and its impacts. Competences are divided among local, regional and national authorities. Climate adaptation thus requires cooperation, particularly in metropolitan regions. This raises issues of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of adaptation measures recommended in local Master Plans. The focus here is on how the 13 municipalities in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area—expected to be the part of Sweden most affected by impacts of climate change—address and act upon issues of climate change adaptation within the framework of Sweden's Planning and Building Act, which places responsibility for the “common interest” of climate adaptation with local governments. Analysing municipal Master Plans, as well as the comments on these plans from the regional County Administrative Board and from Goteborg Region Association of Local Authorities, the inter...

Although starting out as a protest movement in the early 1980s, the Swedish Greens moved to become a contractual supporter of Social Democratic governments from 1998 to 2006, and then became an active partner of the Red–Green Coalition seeking parliamentary power in the 2010 general elections. Against the background of lingering strife between ‘fundis’ and ‘realos’ in Green parties, national survey data is used to analyse how this shift from anti- to pro-system party has affected political trust among Swedish Green sympathisers. Although the general level of political trust among Green sympathisers goes up during the period of ever closer cooperation with the Social Democrats, the effect of being a Green Party sympathiser remains negatively associated with political trust regardless of proximity to power. Possible explanations of this pattern, which seems exclusively attached to former anti-parties, are discussed.

The objectives for energy saving in the housing sector set by recent Swedish energy and climate policies are quite demanding. This article uses nation-wide Swedish survey data from 2004 to 2007 to explore the potential for achieving those targets. Earlier findings that socio-economic characteristics such as age, housing type and income are strongly linked to higher propensities to save on heating and hot water usage are confirmed by ordered logistic regression models. However, general environmental attitudes are also found to play a crucial role. When assessing the relative importance of socioeconomic factors and environmental attitudes, the effect on energy saving is generally greater for the former than the latter. In addition, important interaction effects are identified. In relative terms, the effect of environmental attitudes is clearly stronger among households in apartment blocks than among those in detached housing, and stronger among households with higher income than among those with lower income. We end by discussing the implications for the selection and targeting of policy measures to tap the energy savings potential in the population.

Proponents of the cosmopolitan view of ecological citizenship claim that in order to fulfil the moral obligations of global justice, citizens must undergo deep attitude shifts and adopt green civic virtues. To test this empirically, a typology of four major combinations of environmental attitudes and ecological practise is constructed and the extent to which these four citizen types are found in Sweden is assessed using data from nationwide annual surveys. Discovery of a large group of citizens whose practice is green ecological but who exhibit grey environmental attitudes leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the assertions of proponents of the cosmopolitan view, citizens can indeed come out ecologically clean without undergoing deep attitudinal shifts, without turning green.

This article uses a framework combining the discourse of scalar politics with a social dilemma perspective. The aim is to find answers to why political interests advocate a specific scalar arrangement. Analyzing informant interviews with top politicians and administrators in four municipal governments in the Gothenburg region of southwestern Sweden, we find that although all recognize the social dilemma, the size and capacity of their local government lead to different scalar arguments about responsibility for climate change. Regardless of municipal size and capacity, however, actors' recommendations finally converge in a pattern of path dependence. Already well-entrenched structures of intermunicipal urban cooperation are seen as the scalarly most appropriate vehicle for addressing the social dilemma and for allocating responsibility for climate-related regional action. This opens up for comparative urban research on how new and existing transboundary urban structures handle climate issues in terms of legitimacy and efficiency.

Sweden aims at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by four per cent by 2008–2012 from the 1990 level. The different measures to achieve this effectively involve local-level organizations. A survey was made among 356 local public and private officers in south-western Sweden to tap respondents' views on different aspects of the climate issue. Regression models were used to investigate the impact of (a) environmental concern and (b) organizational and societal norms on (c) support of policy measures against greenhouse gas emissions, where measures were categorized according to perceived level of acceptability. Here, those easily accepted are defined as low-cost, and those not so easily accepted as high-cost strategies. Overall results indicate that acceptance of climate policy measures depends on both organizational affiliation—where you ‘sit’—and professional role—what you ‘do’. With respect to where you ‘sit’, there is a strong correlation between (1) views of the seriousness/threat of climate cha...

This paper analyses proposals for new multi-level governance of Swedish water resources to implement the EU Water Framework Directive. The question is, do they satisfy the criteria for ecologically rational and democratically legitimate governance? The core of the analysis concerns an administrative 'trilemma' encountered in designing ecologically effective and democratically acceptable multi-level governance. This trilemma is characterised by tensions between effectiveness, participation and legitimacy, all core values of 'good governance'. The Swedish proposal constitutes an effort to achieve cost-effective implementation of the EU Directive through an ecosystem-based multi-level organisation. It also seeks to bring about democratically legitimate governance through stakeholder networks and negotiations at the sub-catchment level, and governance 'partnerships' among local governments and organised interests. In particular, the assessment addresses issues of integrating such 'super-local' and local alter...

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.

This paper analyses the outcome of an actor game aimed at finding ways to institutionalise farmer co-operation in a water catchment threatened by eutrophication from heavy use of fertilisers. Although offered several advantageous options for collective action, acting farmers stuck to their preference for individual management in spite of very draconian measures from central authorities. Theories on collective action developed by Mancur Olson and Elinor Ostrom cover some ground in explaining this puzzling outcome, as do Fritz Scharpf's models of games played out under the 'shadow of hierarchy'. However, the most decisive factor for the farmers' choice of strategy seems to stand Mancur Olson's theory on its head, and adds to the importance of trust and reciprocity emphasised by Elinor Ostrom. Because the farmers knew each other well, and because of the transparency of farmers' action in the geographically limited catchment, they turned down options of co-operation; too few farmers were considered trustworth...

This paper seeks to assess the tenability of Rhodes’ view of the “new governance” as “governing without government,” as well as the validity of Pierre and Peters’ assertions that the state is still at the center of structures and processes of governance. The case used for analysis is Sweden’s ecological modernization and the implementation of Local Investment Programs for Sustainable Development. This case provides a crucial test of the contradictory propositions of Rhodes and Pierre and Peters. Contrary to Rhodes’ assertions, central government held the initiative in the process of implementing Sweden’s ecological modernization. In line with the arguments of Pierre and Peters, central government created new structures and processes of governance to keep its initiative over constitutionally independent expert agencies and municipal governments—exactly those actors that, in Rhodes’ view, could make central governmental steering well nigh impossible. As the paper illustrates, what government gains in direct control over the process, it may well lose in terms of the end results. The case of “new governance” analyzed here thus directs attention to the critical interplay between structure, process, and end results, and to government’s role in governance.

How can the change from ‘traditional environmental policy’ towards ‘ecological modernisation’, visible in many countries, be explained? After establishing the elements of ‘ecological modernisation’ found in recent literature, this article first assesses whether the recent and massive environmental policy changes in Sweden fit these characteristics. In the next step, two models of environmental policy change (Janicke’s ‘environmental capacity-building’ and Hajer’s ‘argumentative approach’) are applied to the Swedish case in order to evaluate their explanatory power. Neither of the models seems to provide a fully adequate explanation of the Swedish shift towards ecological modernisation. Janicke’s model directs our attention to structural and institutional factors that establish the context, but it does not provide links between actors and contexts that account for the dynamics and specific direction of change. Hajer puts the focus on dynamics of change, but is less explicit on the importance of the structural positions and power resources of actors engaging in the process of change. The challenge, then, is to find ways of combining structural-institutional models of environmental capacity-building and social constructivist discourse analysis into a more satisfactorily and fully covering theory of environmental policy change.

Starting from the Conservative assertion that home ownership fosters politic- ally active and virtuous citizens, this paper examines two lines of argument in housing theory; (a) Jim Kemeny's thesis that owner occupation is closely linked to increasing privatism, i.e. a growth in lifestyles centred around the home and privacy rather than the workplace or the public affairs in a society, and (b) Peter Saunders' thesis that home owners will organise and mobilise politically in defence of their property interests if and when various government agencies threaten to remove their tax subsidies. To test these propositions empirically, data on the effects of the rapid and comprehensive dismantling of tax privileges to Swedish home owners in the 1980s and early 1990s are confronted with data on political interest, participation and knowledge as well as civic trust and responsibility from the Swedish election surveys of 1979, 1985 and 1991. Contrary to Conservative beliefs, home owners do not stand out as 'democratic examples'; with the exception of political knowledge and party membership, they are no more 'civil' or 'democratic' than other citizens. There is also not much to support Kemeny's 'privatism' or Saunders' 'reaction-to-threat' theses. Although home owners in Sweden saw their tax privileges diminishing rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s, they do not show the distinctive patterns of change in democratic orientation and spirit predicted by these two housing theorists. To allow for an even more conclusive test of Kemeny's 'privatism' thesis, however, one must overcome the mismatch of income de® nitions in housing statistics and election survey data.

Preface * From Kyoto to the Town Hall: Transforming National Strategies into Local and Individual Action * Coping with Climate Change:Sweden's Climate Strategy as a Case in Point * Explaining Public Trust in Institutions: The Role of Consensual Expert Ideas * Is there a Trade off between Cost-Effective Climate Policies and Political Legitimacy? * Assessing Values in Environmental Policy Formation * Organizational Culture, Professional Norms and Local Implementation of National Climate Policy * Policy Effectiveness and the Diffusion of Carbon-Free Energy Technology: The Case of Wind Power * Sharing Burdens in the European Union for the Protection of the Global Climate: A Swedish Perspective * Governing the Climate, (B)ordering the World * Multilevel Governance: A Solution to Climate Change Management? * Index

Recent contributions to the literature on collective action towards common pool resources (CPR) hold that for such action to become institutionalized among the principals sharing the CPR, there must develop “trust and a sense of community.” Using data on existing environmental cooperation among Swedish municipalities, as well as data from a 1991 survey of Chief Environmental Inspectors in those municipalities, this article analyzes whether the content, intensity and patterns of the cooperation and contacts across municipal borders do in fact contribute to such a development. Using the results of this analysis, the article ends with a discussion of the odds for a supply of CPR regimes across municipal boundaries in Sweden.

In this essay, I try to roll some stones away which block the resurrection of policy as a proper focus for comparative housing research. To this end, I propose a classification of policy content based on processes common to all systems of housing provision. I also outline an analytical framework linking important contextual factors to that content, and allowing for the elaboration of theories concerning those linkages. The framework furthermore links policy to consequences in housing as well as in other parts of society. Finally, I discuss how policy‐focussed housing studies should address issues in evaluative research on housing.