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Abstract
Housing plays an important role in the development of welfare policies and also often in achieving sustainability goals. There exists, however, implementation gaps between policies and practices in urban development and housing. Here it should be possible to draw lessons from policy implementations in the past. In this article we explore the strategies of the Swedish central government in implementing a social housing policy in the mid-20th century. The policy was successfully implemented in that it resulted in the rapid expansion and modernisation of the Swedish apartment stock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and acute housingshortages and poor housing standards were overcome. The main lesson learned from the Swedish case study is the critical role of the central government in implementation throughthe strategic coordination of policy aims, instruments, stakeholders and interests throughout the implementation process. Although the central government could have used hard, almost authoritarian policy instruments to force the realisation of the new policy, it mainly used soft policy tools and focused on coordination. In the contemporary networked governance setting, the central government, like no other player, still has the potential to guide and coordinate implementation processes for the realization of sustainable housing visions.
Highlights
Housing is often considered a core of social policy realisation since a dwelling constitutes a key hub in people’s daily lives
Policies for more sustainable housing and daily activity patterns are tricky to implement [3,4,5], and we can identify implementation gaps from policies to practices in urban development and housing, gaps which have been identified by van Bueren & De Jong [6] as caused by institutional rather than technological barriers
We focus on policy instruments and in particular the role of the central government, its coordinative role and its potential to promote sustainable housing and urban development today
Summary
Housing is often considered a core of social policy realisation since a dwelling constitutes a key hub in people’s daily lives. Sustainable housing policies advantageously cover a number of areas, ranging from the choice of building materials, construction technologies and housing types to residential heating methods and affordability This implies our focus is on the environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability. There are examples of institutional arrangements which have succeeded in closing potential gaps from formulation to outcomes and which have contributed to the implementation of new housing policies One such illustration is the rapid housing development following a social housing policy in Sweden from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. The term stems from an ambition of the Social Democratic government to eliminate the housing shortage.) and the construction of over one million (1,006,000) [8] new apartments in urban areas over ten years (1965–1974), and this in a country with a population of around 7.5 million (1960). This coordinative and collaborative strategy was in turn closely related to the general corporatism model of governance in Sweden at the time [14]
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