Swedish Policy Research Articles

Co-producing ‘The Future(s) We Want’: How does political imagination translate into democratised knowledge-action models for sustainability transformations?

Democratic societies face the challenge of effecting sustainability transformations, allowing for variously imagined futures and underpinned by a diversity of practices of knowledge production and action. This article investigates how political imagination of sustainable futures informs the ways knowledge and action are understood and linked in sustainability and research policy, and what potential implications this has for democratic transformative change. Empirically, the article analyses the overarching sustainability and research policies in Sweden, focusing on the central documents produced by the government and public research financiers. The analysis shows parallels between the conceptualisations of sustainability and knowledge-action, characterised by linearity, instrumentalisation of knowledge and circumscription of power-sharing spaces for knowledge creation against the background of endorsement of collaborations between academia and society. Such conceptualisations, apart from sending mixed signals to sustainability researchers and practitioners, potentially enable knowledge and action processes driven by impact, competitiveness and atomisation, precluding the exercise of the intrinsic value of democratic knowledge and action practices necessary for reflexive governance of transformations towards sustainability.

De‐gendering parents: Gender inclusion and standardised language in screen‐level bureaucracy

AbstractSwedish welfare organisations have a long history of promoting gender equality and inclusivity, involving implementation of more gender‐inclusive language (e.g., non‐gendered terminology). This study analysed the use of non/gendered expressions at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, as state policy is realised in conjunction with personalised service in textual interaction in screen‐level bureaucracy. We drew on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to analyse 378 email interactions between clients and social insurance officers, focusing on gendered institutional terminology and gendered person references. The findings suggest that social insurance officers avoided a heteronormative language, in line with Swedish official public language policy, but that a gender‐neutral language may come at the cost of formality, standardisation, and de‐personalisation. The study brings new knowledge on the ways in which street‐level bureaucrats manage responsiveness and standardisation in digital text‐based interaction with clients.

Situated dynamics of environmental governance in Swedish smart energy experimentation: Tentativeness, demonstration, upscaling

In this article unfolding processes of environmental governance are explored through the case of smart energy experimentation in Sweden. When experimentation merges with place-based dynamics, particular dispositions are shaped, with different implications for environmental politics. In accordance with other researchers’ findings it is illuminated how such dispositions tend to reinforce neoliberal environmental governance arrangements, whereas it is revealed how experimentation can also reconfigure governance. Attending to unfolding processes of accomplishing governance across a variety of spaces, this plasticity of experimentation is explored. The contribution consists of highlighting the situated dynamics playing out as environmental governance is produced across different places. This involves two analytical steps. First, disentangling some characteristics of experimentation as a situated disposition, through following how smart energy experimentation arranges environmental governance across the national Swedish energy and environmental policy landscape. The analysis highlights how particular characteristics of Swedish environmental governance molds experimentation into providing impetus for neoliberalization. Second, by zooming in two cases of experiments, elucidating the effects of the tentative and situated character of experimentation as governance is accomplished. Such analysis attends to the situated micro-politics of experiments, and how these can shape localized dispositions that refract broader neoliberal political rationality. Thereby the existence of a dominant ‘experimentation governmentality’, or disposition, is discovered, whereas situated experiments may always provide seedbeds of alternative forms of environmental governance due to experimentation’s plasticity.

Back to Square One. Green Sacrifice Zones in Sápmi and Swedish Policy Responses to Energy Emergencies

In the wake of the enthusiasm for green energy, previously contested energy and mining projects can be framed as part of a green transition. When state authorities decide to forego the standard procedural protections and the processes and forums for deliberation and local influence, it contributes to constructing green sacrifice zones. This paper compares two Swedish energy policy processes. The first is occurred during World War II and the hydropower expansion of the 1940s and 1950s. The second takes place today when wind power is expanding to increase renewable energy production. In Sweden, policymaking seems to be back to square one in the green transition, leaving out both important knowledge of the past and contemporary voices of the ongoing and probable consequences. In certain issues, such as how the recognition of the Indigenous status of the Sámi actually affects the legislative process and how to address the Indigenous rights of the Sámi, policymaking is particularly slow to adapt. The green transition industry is already affecting the Sámi, as the construction of the Nordic welfare society has done during the last century, and still does. It deepens an ongoing colonial wave that started in the 1300s. By showing how the Swedish legislative process, historically as well as currently, has neglected to involve Sámi representatives, this study points to the importance and obligation of Swedish policymaking to engage Sámi representatives in an early phase to avoid further sacrifice zones in Sápmi.

Gender equality in Swedish AI policies. What's the problem represented to be?

AbstractOver the past few decades, Sweden has established itself as a “world leader” in gender equality. Alongside this development, Swedish politicians have also initiated ambitious plans that aim to establish the country as “world class” in terms of digitalization. International research shows that women and racialized groups are in a minority in the design processes, that AI facial recognition systems are built with white male faces as the norm, and that digital tools replicate racial injustices. In this paper, we are interested in if, and if so how, gender equality is articulated and thus filled with meaning in national policies on AI and digitalization. The overall aim is to discuss the potential of gender (equality) mainstreaming to challenge systems of privilege in the implementation of AI systems in the public sector. The paper analyses how gender equality is filled with meaning in national policy documents on AI and gender equality. The main findings show that gender equality is turned into a question of lack of knowledge and information, which in turn blocks out an understanding of gender equality as something that is related to gendered power relations.

The future scribe: Learning to write the world

This study takes its point of departure in academic scholarship that points to how programming – reading and writing code – is the literacy of the future, in other words, non-specialized competence that should be acquired in education in parity with traditional reading and writing skills. The goal is to shed light on how programming can be orchestrated in education to break with the outworn dichotomy between the ‘two cultures’ that C. P. Snow formulated as a gap between, on the one hand, natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, and, on the other hand, the humanities, and social sciences. A discursive analysis of Swedish policy documents and curricula forms the empirical ground for discussing how reading and writing code are introduced, taught, and learnt within Swedish compulsory school. The results show that Swedish curricula are framing programming as specialized knowledge within technology and mathematics, rather than allowing it to be a dimension of several subjects, such as the humanities and social sciences. These findings are discussed in the light of recent studies in education that have explored interrelations between coding and reading and writing texts. The discussion leads up to suggestions for implementing reading and writing code as digital literacy in education.

Changes in the governance of the reading subject: Swedish reading policy, c.1949–1984

ABSTRACT This paper analyses significant changes in the political rationality underpinning Sweden’s official reading policy between the 1940s and 1980s. Using official inquiry reports as empirical material and drawing on a discourse analytical method, we examine policy changes regarding ideal readers (what reading should result in) and administrative practices (what policy actions could be used) and the kinds of academic knowledge that was used to justify specific measures. It is found that official reading policy ceased to be limited to distributing literature and expanded to include active reading promotion. The replacement of sociological perspectives by cognitive viewpoints as constituting knowledge is also noted. It is concluded that changes in the political rationality had consequences for how the individual reader was construed, from a subject with the potential to change society to a subject who had to adjust to society. We argue that the cultivation of readers evident in reading policy constitutes a specific technique of governance not sufficiently considered in previous cultural policy research.

Responsibilizing renovation: governing strategies and resistance in the context of the transformation of Swedish housing policy

This article contributes to the emerging body of literature in the field of urban studies that addresses the classical ‘division of labour’ between analyses of the workings of urban power at the macro- and micro-levels. Our theoretical framework aims to capture how processes of power are exercised in processes of urban restructuring. In the field of gentrification studies there have been calls for theoretical developments based on analyses of various local contexts in which rent gaps may be exploited in similar yet varied ways. We contribute to this discussion through an analysis of governing strategies and protests linked to urban restructuring in the context of the so-called Million Programme in Sweden’s two largest cities. In particular, we address the consequences of public housing companies being forced to operate according to ‘business principles’. Importantly, we demonstrate how advanced liberal government, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, has largely worked through a process of responsibilization. We discern a chain of responsibilization leading from the macro-, via the meso-, to the micro-level – ultimately involving the individual tenant; and highlight how a struggle that we call a politics of responsibility has taken place around each link in the chain.

Debating the Drug Policy in Sweden: Stakeholders’ Moral Justifications in Media 2015–2021

Drug-related harms continue to increase globally and governments struggle in search of effective and legitimate countermeasures. The choice between policy options is intertwined with the arguments that dominate drug policy discussions, which in turn are closely related to who has access to the policy debate. In this study, we examine stakeholders’ visibility and moral justifications of argumentation in the Swedish drug policy debate in the media (2015–2021). Justification analysis (JA) is used as a methodological and theoretical tool to illustrate the moral principles behind the claims by the stakeholders. The results show that the most visible stakeholders were politicians, government agencies and molders of public opinion. Furthermore, the stakeholders with successful active attempts to participate in the debate were molders of public opinion, NGOs, and politicians. The silent stakeholders in the media were people who use drugs and significant others. Stakeholders generally revolve around a dividing line regarding the restrictive features of Swedish drug policy, and were divided into proponents, opponents and neutral ones. All stakeholder groups included all three sides, hence reflecting the ingroup dissonance that may explain the continuing deadlock in Swedish drug policy. Justifications that value evidence-based policymaking ( industrial worth) was used in the argumentation by the majority of the stakeholder groups, often combined with other moral justifications. This notion challenges the dichotomy of evidence and values in drug policy debates. Proponents relied more on the justifications that value paternalism ( domestic worth), while opponents leaned toward the justifications valuing civil rights and social justice ( civic worth). The development of Swedish drug policy may depend on the relative strength of these two value positions ( domestic versus civic worth) in society and among stakeholders in power. This study continues the discussion of making contesting values explicit in the drug policy, serving a riveting case for international comparison.

Understanding the impact of acoustics on the learning ability among children with autism in the classroom

A pronounced ambition concerning the educational policy in Sweden is to organize an all-inclusive school, meaning that schools should be able to meet the needs of all children, irrespective of their capacities and conditions. However, there were no specific guidelines for the school environment as a learning environment. In my thesis The Human Environment Interaction-model is implemented to identify environmental factors that affect children with ADHD, autism, and Down's syndrome and their ability to concentrate in their learning environment at school. The issue was not to dismiss any of the additional resources these children are in need of; instead it was to suggest how to arrange learning environments in the most supportive way possible. This presentation will focus on aspects of acoustics which are—and which are not—beneficial for children with autism. The results from the thesis have been an underlying basis for further work at the National Agency for Special Needs Educations and Schools in Sweden, which will also be presented. The developed work at the Agency resulted in a tool with guidelines to make the learning environment more accessible for all children in existing classrooms, but it can also be implemented in the building process.

A journey into the new employment service landscape of responsibilisation: Towards de‐personalisation of the caseworker–jobseeker relationship

AbstractThe article analyses a new culture of responsibilisation implicated in a recent management reform in the Swedish Public Employment Service. Based on an interview study and organisational documents, it is shown that the reform entails a new form of responsibilisation of jobseekers as well as caseworkers. As jobseekers are expected to ‘carry their own case’ through the administrative job‐search process, they are obliged to manage tasks that used to be in the caseworker's area of responsibility. Furthermore, caseworkers are expected to regulate themselves in new ways and change their mind‐set according to new organisational values and behavioural norms, requiring a restraining of their availability to clients. It is argued that the employment agency is increasingly turned into the agency of the active and responsible jobseeker, which entails one further shift towards individual responsibility in Swedish labour market policy and one further step towards the breakup of a personal caseworker–jobseeker relationship.

Climate-Related Co-Benefits and the Case of Swedish Policy

There is strong scientific evidence for the existence of the significant economic value of several climate-related co-benefits. However, these are seldom recognised in policy-making, and knowledge is still scarce on some co-benefit types and categories. To identify research needs and highlight policy-making opportunities, we propose a new framework and three-type-taxonomy of climate-related co-benefits. We define climate policy co-benefits, such as improved air quality, as ‘Type 1’; co-benefits for climate objectives from policy-making in other fields, such as taxation, as ‘Type 2’; and co-benefits from policies designed to achieve multiple objectives as ‘Type 3’. In order to apply the framework and to analyse how co-benefits have been regarded in policy-making in a climate pioneering country, we also explore the case of Sweden. It is shown that several co-benefits exist, but that these are overlooked almost entirely in policy-making, constituting a bias against climate mitigation. In order to counteract this problem, the article presents a number of recommendations, including a call to researchers to identify and quantify additional co-benefits and to policy-makers on governance reforms, including the need to organise policy-making processes and set decision criteria that promote the consideration of co-benefits.

How justice shapes transition governance – a discourse analysis of Swedish policy debates

In both policy-making and academia, the realisation is growing that transitions striving for sustainability have to be just to be socially accepted. This insight has given rise to institutionalised approaches to a “just transition” – but also beyond these, justice is a key challenge in the governance of sustainability transitions. In this paper, we examine how justice arguments are being used in national-level discourses of transition governance in Sweden. Analysing 121 policy-related documents from 2019 to 2021, we found that justice was discursively treated in a way that essentially stifled change. Political actors attempted to trump each other’s justice claims rather than to genuinely engage with them. Justice concerns that would not serve re-election, such as solidarity across social boundaries, were almost absent from the material. Based on these findings, we critically explore how justice arguments contribute to politicizing transition governance in particular ways, rendering some policy options impossible.

The Swedish green infrastructure policy as a policy assemblage: What does it do for biodiversity conservation?

AbstractGreen infrastructure (GI) is increasingly used in policymaking to promote biodiversity and enhance ecosystem services through the protection, creation, restoration and connection of natural and man‐made green areas.The EU Commission adopted in 2013, the concept as a strategy. When member states apply the policy, it is translated into specific bureaucratic and political systems, creating different ‘policy assemblages’ of ideas and institutional features.We analyse the Swedish GI policy to draw conclusions about how it has been assembled in one particular member state and what that particular assemblage will imply for biodiversity conservation. In combination with understanding policies as assemblages, we use the ‘What's the problem represented to be’‐approach as method.We show that the Swedish GI policy assemblage consists of a mix of policy ideas developed in Sweden and the EU. Despite the current strong focus on biodiversity conservation, the notion of land's multifunctionality, characterizing the EU strategy and the possibility to conserve biodiversity on land used for purposes other than conservation increasingly influence the Swedish policy as it is formed.Although the policy has the potential to mainstream biodiversity conservation measures across different sectors, based on our analysis of current discourse, its implementation will likely promote GI measures less disruptive to existing land use activities, making its capacity to halt biodiversity loss marginal.Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

How does falling incumbent profitability affect energy policy discourse? The discursive construction of nuclear phaseouts and insufficient capacity as a threat in Sweden

What happens to energy policy discourse when falling profitability makes it difficult to frame incumbent technologies as necessary for providing affordable energy? And how does this affect energy policy? This article investigates how Swedish energy policy discourse responded to a profitability crisis that struck its incumbent nuclear regime in 2016, and how a political decision to support nuclear power was legitimized. It uses Carol Bacchi's Foucault-inspired policy analysis to analyse 13 interviews and 31 policy documents, and shows how the crisis was met with the framing of nuclear power as a “plannable” energy source (in contrast with intermittent renewables) that was necessary for ensuring capacity adequacy, and with the construction of an ultimatum: to remove a tax on nuclear power or to see nuclear power phased out so abruptly that the power system would be jeopardized. It explores the discursive and institutional conditions that enabled this framing, argues that similar discourses are likely to be constructed in other contexts where capacity adequacy is a more pressing impediment to energy transitions than in Sweden, and points out that energy research risks reproducing dominant discourses by overstating the merits of incumbent baseload technologies.

Threatification, riskification, or normal politics? A review of Swedish climate adaptation policy 2005–2022

While the securitization of climate change has attracted considerable attention in academia, there is less research on the securitization of climate adaptation. We study securitization trends in Swedish climate adaptation policy from 2005 to 2022 and investigate whether Swedish climate adaptation policy adheres to threatification, riskification, or normal politics. More specifically, we look at i) discourses, ii) actor constellations, and iii) tools and resources. We find that in 2005, extreme weather events triggered a discourse shift in climate adaptation from a non-political issue towards riskification. Sweden adopted a national climate adaptation strategy in 2018, framing climate change as a risk that can be controlled through adaptation. So far, climate adaptation is managed using existing tools and strategies including research and decision support, recommendations from expert agencies, and climate risk assessments. In a similar vein, actor constellations resemble the normal governance structure. Climate adaptation appears to be integrated into business-as-usual politics rather than enforcing risk governance, and managed through existing tools and strategies instead of prompting extraordinary measures beyond day-to-day operations.

Do asylum‐seekers respond to policy changes? Evidence from the Swedish–Syrian case*

AbstractDo asylum‐seekers respond to policy changes in their destination country, and to what extent? We approach this question by using high‐frequency data, and we focus on a sudden liberalization in Swedish policy toward Syrian asylum‐seekers, which implied permanent instead of temporary residence. We show a clear and fast, yet temporary, increase in Syrian asylum applications in Sweden after the policy change. Also, the policy caused a shift – not limited to the short term – in the share of individuals arriving without family, and consequently in the share applying for family reunification. Our study adds quasi‐experimental evidence to the literature on inter‐country asylum flows and migration policy.

Undén — Hammarsjöld Political Duet: the New Doctrine of Swedish Neutrality in Action

The aim of the article is to analyze the relationship between two Swedish politicians — Ö. Undén and D. Hammarsjöld: one of them was a creator of the Swedish foreign policy doctrine after the World War II and another was the UN secretary general. They stayed allied working together in the same department in Sweden and even after Hammarsjöld became the UN secretary general. The article shows how mutual interest to keep the peace at all levels helped to relieve world tension between conflicts’ participants. Thus, it interesting how these politicians are cross-influencing to each other and how the base principles of “home” policy was implemented in operation of international organization. Studying the political duet Undén — Hammarsjöld it supports to come to conclusion that both politicians have used similar procedures and management methods.

Daily labor mobility and the timing of entry into motherhood

The influence of female employment on fertility has been widely studied. However, there is a gap in the knowledge of the effect of daily labor mobility on fertility. The paper presents the study of the direct and indirect effects of commuting on the timing of entry into motherhood by comparison the age‐specific first‐birth rates of female commuters and non‐commuters. The effects appear in simultaneous decision making on childbearing and com‐ muting, and effects of cross‐municipal flows of population and earnings, and fertility norms diffusion on childbearing. Estimation strategy addresses the problem of potential endogeneity of commuting decision. The study uses individual register data from Sweden for women born in 1974 and residing in the Stockholm area following them from 19 to 32 years old. Results demonstrate that commuting women postpone their first birth. Commuters’ first‐birth rates are more sensitive to the changes in relative earnings, fertility norms, and the proportion of commuters in the residing population. Swedish family and labor policies significantly improve reconciliation of family and working life in comparison with many European countries. However, the study demonstrates that the policies do not address commuting costs (in a general meaning) in childbearing decision. The results can be used to explain the link between fertility and daily labor mobility in high‐income countries with a high proportion of women involved in daily labor mobility.

Read and accepted? Scoping the cognitive accessibility of privacy policies of health apps and websites in three European countries.

Trust and accessibility are vital to adoption of health and wellness apps. This research scoped three elements of cognitive accessibility of health app privacy policies: availability, ease of navigation, and readability. For this cross-sectional study, quantitative data collected in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom included: whether privacy information was in a country's official language (availability); number of distracting visual elements (ease of navigation); word count and Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) reading level (readability). Health app privacy policies were compared to policies from a purposively selected sample of websites, and to benchmarks, including CEFR reading level B1. Health app privacy policies were less often available in countries' official languages compared to sampled websites (Chi-Square [1, 180] = 57.470, p < 0.001) but contained fewer distracting visual elements. More UK privacy policies were in the country's official language, whereas Swedish privacy policies contained fewest words and fewest potentially distracting design elements. Only one privacy policy met the CEFR reading level benchmark. Lack of privacy information in non-Anglophone app-users' native languages and high reading levels may be major barriers to cognitive accessibility. Web and app developers should consider recommendations arising from this study, to stimulate trust in and adoption of health and wellness apps.