Stig Montin

The Swedish Model: Many Actors and Few Strong Leaders

The organisation of the political executive in Swedish local government has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century. The view of local selfgovernment held at that time was that lay representatives rather than civil servants should be responsible for all decision-making. However, during the 1960s there took place a cultural shift which has been described as a transformation from ‘administration by laymen’ to ‘administration by professionals’ (Stromberg and Westerstahl, 1984). The degree of professionalisation has increased ever since. Currently, more than one million people — some 21 per cent of the workforce — are employed at local government level, compared with 6 per cent in state employment. The municipality is often the largest employer in its local area.

Between Fragmentation and Coordination

The article describes recent development in the Swedish local government system. This is made through four different ‘organizing perspectives’. Three organizing perspectives challenge the model of local popular government. The functional challenge focuses on the market orientation, which means that nearly all sorts of public activities should be put on the market according ti the belief that competition is the most important motor of public economy. The communitarian challenge focuses on the social and political order of user and citizen organizations in relation to the municipal organization, which can be viewed in terms of the relation between small-scale democracy and the large-scale democracy. Finally, the idea of governance structures focuses on how to mobilize and integrate different types of resources across borders within the public sector and between public and private institutions. By using the different organizing perspectives it is shown that the development of local politics and democracy is driven by different ideas. Experiences from reforms, which are related to these ideas, are presented. The article concludes by pointing out some important challenges for future development of local democracy in Sweden.

Local Government and the Market. The Case of Public Services and Care for the Elderly in Sweden

The local government in Sweden is politically accountable for a wide range of services and the provision of these services has been increasingly contracted out, and municipally owned companies have increasingly become players in various markets. Municipal companies are ‘hybrid organisations’ which means that they act as commercial enterprises in a competitive environment whilst also serving the public interest. Contracting out of social services was extended in the 2000s, mainly to for-profit companies. Municipal politicians and professionals are required to act in a ‘competition neutral’ manner, that is, in-house providers and private competitors must be treated equally. Gradually the market has entered into local government and local government has entered into the market, which means that the boundary between public and private has become even more blurred.

What if performance accountability mechanisms engender distrust

An axiomatic assumption in contemporary democratic theory is that accountability mechanisms generate trust and legitimacy in and for democratic systems: in relation to decision-makers (elected officials), facilitators (the public bureaucracy) and outcomes of public policy (scope and quality). However, how wise is it to take this assumption for granted? What if accountability mechanisms applied in democracies with high levels of trust promote distrust rather than trust? This article will elaborate on and analyse the inherent theoretical logic of performance scrutiny as a basis for performance accountability in political-administrative systems inspired by new public management reforms. Performance scrutiny practices derived from Sweden, a high-trust society, are used as empirical illustrations and as a basis to generate hypotheses on how and why practices to analysis performance accountability have the potential to counteract trust.

The Institutionalisation of Performance Scrutiny Regimes and Beyond: The Case of Education and Elderly Care in Sweden

The chapter provides an overview of the institutionalisation of performance scrutiny regimes related to local government level in Sweden. The most important driving forces behind the development is analysed, and some effects with special focus on primary education and elderly care are highlighted. The intended effects can be observed, as well as a number of unintended effects such as less democratic control, de-professionalisation, and bureaucratisation, and even decreased trust. Some observed negative effects of performance scrutiny within education and elder care have recently been put on the central government’s agenda. However, it is an open question whether this new policy orientation will affect and change the performance scrutiny regime.

Functions of sustainability: exploring what urban sustainability policy discourse “does” in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT Studies on urban sustainability policy often analyse what it is, could or should be in terms of contents, objectives and rationale. Often neglected, however, is what sustainability discourse actually “does”. For this article, we explored the function of sustainability discourse in a collaborative metropolitan governance process of 1998–2014 that resulted in an infrastructural strategy aiming for “sustainable growth” in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area (GMA). We asked why sustainability had become a hegemonic concept in urban politics despite the paradoxical decoupling of objectives, outputs and outcomes from environmental protection and social equity in policy achievement. We argue that sustainability works as a vehicular idea that brings significant value to fragile governance arenas by functioning as a linguistic political mechanism with no essence other than the capability to attract positive affections for any coalition of actors with the power to mobilise others. In the GMA, sustainability served as a cohesive and mobilising discourse empowering a coalition of techno-economic experts to “get things done” and make an unruly city region governable enough to develop infrastructure perceived as crucial for the advancement of economic-growth projects.