Abstract
There is a growing maintenance debt of ageing and critical infrastructures in many municipalities in European welfare states. In this article, we use the multidimensional concept of local capacity as a point of departure to analyse how and in what ways Swedish municipalities work with the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including municipal road networks as well as water and sewage systems. For the road networks, maintenance is generally outsourced to contractors and there is also a large degree of tolerance for various standards on different road segments within and between the municipalities. Less used road segments are not as prioritised as those with heavy traffic. For the water and sewage systems, in-house technical capacity is needed as differences in water quality are not tolerated. Economies of scale mean that in-house capacity is translated into the creation of inter-municipal bodies. As different forms of capacities tend to reinforce each other, municipal capacity builds up over time in circular movements. These results add knowledge to current research by pointing to the ways municipalities are overcoming a run-to-failure mentality by building capacity to pay off the infrastructural maintenance debt.
Highlights
In many welfare states, municipalities are facing great challenges in providing public goods andLocal Economy 36(2)services as their critical infrastructure is getting older and prone to breakdown and failures (Bergholz, 2018; Bergholz & Bischoff, 2018; Gasparro, 2018)
We are not interested in analysing local crisis, or serious disturbance in critical infrastructure networks or its continuous flows, but instead, we wish to explore the space between the invisible and visible infrastructure networks and in what ways Swedish municipalities work with routine maintenance of municipal roads and water and sewage infrastructure
We suggest that one way to understand and analyse in what ways Swedish municipalities work with routine maintenance of municipal roads and water and sewage infrastructure is by using the multidimensional concept of capacity
Summary
Services as their critical infrastructure is getting older and prone to breakdown and failures (Bergholz, 2018; Bergholz & Bischoff, 2018; Gasparro, 2018). (2002), we take a broad approach in terms of the financial aspects involved in capacity building and define it as a municipality’s resource available for maintenance of municipal road, and water and sewage infrastructure. The representative from Malmopoints out that since water and sewage competence has largely left the municipal administration to the inter-municipal cooperation body VA SYD, it is problematic for the municipality to critically review and evaluate the proposals for investments and/or maintenance produced by VA SYD This happened, for example, in Helsingborg, where the costs of a large project were considerably underestimated, and the municipality had to revise its budget to be able to finalise the project. Since membership in an inter-municipal organisation such as VA SYD or NSVA would entail multi-level governance, membership would involve a certain degree of complexity This is apparent in those cases where water and sewage maintenance are handled by an inter-municipal body and road maintenance is handled by civic road associations. The politician in Malmopointed out, perhaps maintenance in those disenfranchised areas must even be better than in other places
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