Adoption from care, the reunification principle and consensual placements: the political promotion of a controversial child protection measure in Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Swedish child welfare policies have traditionally been family-centred, and great importance has been placed on consensual measures and the reunification of children in care with their birth families. Adoptions of children from care are rare. Thus, when the government commissioned the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) to improve social services’ knowledge about adoption, it seemed to indicate an ideological shift in Swedish child protection policies. For over a year, we documented the activities of the working group at the NBHW as they tried to mediate between what they interpreted as a political attempt to promote adoption on the one hand and social services’ reluctant stance towards adoption on the other. We identified three main challenges in this task: (i) the handling of the commission’s ideological premises, (ii) the question of what kind of knowledge about adoption should be disseminated to social services, and (iii) the question of what knowledge is relevant for social services. The article uses theories of metagovernance to show how the NBHW dealt with these challenges by reframing the commision’s premises, adapting the message and by balancing the objectives of addressing the issues social services identified as relevant and of fulfilling its remit.