To Örebro University

Regulatory intermediaries—organizations that operate between regulators (public and private) and target groups—perform a range of important functions. While most previous research has focused on intermediaries that have been delegated official authority, in this paper we focus on unofficial and informal intermediary functions aiming to advance the governance of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals. Chemical pollution is a growing environmental and health concern, leading to both public and private regulatory initiatives. By studying a particular segment—paperboard food packaging in Sweden—the study generates insights into critical functions performed by unofficial intermediaries (Svenskt Vatten and ChemSec) in this regulatory regime, which extend and expand regulatory reach in various ways. The study also shows the importance of different types of intermediaries that interact in dynamic ways, and the role of material artifacts in processes of intermediation. These unofficial functions are arguably important for the functioning of complex, hybrid forms of governance, but they also prompt critical questions about the effectiveness, legitimacy, and role of intermediaries in generating needed transformative change.

Biodiversity decline undermines the conditions for life on Earth resulting in calls for transformative governance of biodiversity. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, national biodiversity strategies provide the primary mechanism through which governments demonstrate their conservation efforts. With many countries due to develop new strategies under the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, it is timely to assess existing ones to identify policy design elements that could be ‘ratcheted up’ to meet the transformative agenda. This article analyzes andc ompares the policy designs of national biodiversity strategies in Australia, France and Sweden. We cover problem framing, policy goals, targeted groups, implementing agents, and policy instruments, to draw lessons on how national strategies can be designed to further support transformation of biodiversity governance. We identify elements in these strategies that can be used to inspire future ones: a negotiated framing of biodiversity and participatory processes in France, nested and integrated goals, targets and measures in Sweden, and an engagement with indigenous knowledge in Australia. However, to bring about transformative change, the analysis also shows the need for novel and fundamental re-designs to successfully target indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, shift power relations, and make biodiversity conservation a priority rather than an option.

The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has played an important role in assessing knowledge and raising awareness of biodiversity loss, and it is now also mandated to assess and support processes of transformative change. This perspective paper argues that the transformative change assessment entails key elements of transformative agency, which, along with the performative role of IPBES, makes it relevant to re-conceptualize the organization as a transformative agent. This new role will change IPBES and brings attention to risks related to undermining the credibility, relevance and legitimacy of IPBES, but it also brings opportunities for innovations that may strengthen the organization, including furthering public reasoning, acknowledging ambiguities and disagreements, ensuring scientific autonomy and balancing governmental power in the organization. As IPBES takes on the fundamental challenge of transformative change, critical scrutiny and democratic debate regarding its function as a political actor are more important than ever.

Collaboration has become a key element of governments’ efforts to address complex policy problems as well as of attempts to revitalise democracy. Depending on what public agencies want to achieve by engaging in collaboration – whether collaboration is intendedto gain support for public policymaking, induce voluntary actions by stakeholders, or something else – collaborative governance will have to mean very different things.Collaborative governance needs to be made fit for purpose. Drawing on the literature and a case study of road safety governance in Sweden, the article theorises on the interplay between strategic purpose and institutional design in collaborative governance and shows how two types of strategic purposes – policy support and voluntary actions – determine appropriate choices of institutional designs. This generates important insights that contribute to understanding institutional diversity and factors important to the success or failure of collaborative governance, and can aid practitioners who are designing collaborative forums within various policy fields.

Consequences of public officials’ policy influence have been at the center of debates on political–administrative relations. Based on a survey of public managers in Swedish local government (N = 1,430), this study examines whether policy politics hollows out political neutrality. The analysis shows that although managers are highly involved in policy politics, attitudinal support for the neutrality principle is strong. The enquiry into behavioral intentions shows more variation. In relation to a set of dilemmas, most managers would defend neutral competence, but significant minorities would also act for more partisan reasons. However, we find no empirical evidence that policy influence undermines political neutrality.

The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept has attracted substantial interest among researchers and policymakers alike, and there are hopes that it can facilitate much needed policy changes and actions. Implementing it has proved challenging, however. Elaborating on a theoretical framework of key governance elements, and drawing on new empirical findings about the introduction and implementation of ES in Sweden, this paper aims to further the understanding of challenges and opportunities for implementing the ES approach as experienced by policy actors and to discuss its implications for the ability of ES to strengthen environmental governance. The findings show how the ES approach provides important opportunities for (horizontal) integration, professional communication, and networking, but also that further implementation has been hindered by a lack of co-ordination, public participation, and institutionalization. Based on the findings, and with the aim of strengthening the impact of ES on environmental governance, three critical issues in need of elaboration and further debate are discussed: institutionalization, reappraisal of the role of economic valuation, and interest mediation.

This paper explores to what extent and in what ways conceptual innovations matter for biodiversity governance. A three-step analysis is employed, starting with identifying theoretical insights on how concepts matter for transformative change. These insights provide a lens for examining the academic debate on the Ecosystem Services concept and for identifying critical conceptual challenges related to transformative change. Finally, how the concept is used and valued in policy practice is explored through an empirical study of policy practitioners in Sweden. Based on this investigation we conclude that the ES concept holds important but restricted properties for transformative change. The ES concept provides new meanings in the form of economic valuation of nature, but these remain highly contested and difficult to practice; ES function as a boundary object, but poorly integrates social analysis and, in practice engages professionals, rather than resulting in more inclusive public participation; and ES function performatively by reflecting a technocratic ideal and raising awareness rather than targeting fundamental political challenges. Finally, the paper returns to the general questions of how conceptual innovations can generate transformative change and argues that in the continued work of conceptually developing the Nature’s Contribution to People, researchers and practitioners need to pay close attention to interpretive frames, political dimensions, and institutional structures, necessitating a strong role for social analysis in this process of conceptual innovation.

Governments are increasingly turning to new modes of governance to induce nonstate actors to voluntarily take responsibility for societal problems. Using the concept of responsibilization as a theoretical lens, this article analyzes changes in road safety governance in Sweden. How, why, and to whom has the responsibility for road safety been attributed in Swedish policymaking, and how have state authorities engaged in processes of responsibilization during its implementation? The results show a shift in attribution of responsibility from individual road users to a broad set of so-called system designers, based on moral, causal, and preventive rationales. Responsibilization both occurs within the state apparatus and is imposed by state authorities on nonstate actors using soft governance measures. Responsibilization provides a fruitful theoretical lens for governance studies by identifying shifts in responsibility (including deresponsibilization), explicating normative/ethical underpinnings of new governance modes, and helping to open the “black box” of the state.

Voluntary environmental governance is a widely used policy approach that has been criticized for its lack of effectiveness. This raises fundamental questions about how to design processes that can advance voluntary programmes in a way that makes them more successful. In this paper, we analyse a government-initiated dialogue process to phase out hazardous chemicals through voluntary action by the Swedish textile industry. The analysis shows that information transfer primarily motivated business participation, while consumer pressure, regulatory threats and traditions of government–business cooperation played minor roles. The institutional design of the dialogue ensured close interaction within a homogeneous group, but collective actions were limited by disagreement about the problems to be addressed, prior unilateral environmental commitments by leading companies, and ambivalent engagement. This case provides valuable insights into the effect of institutional design on the actual interplay between business and government and its effects on voluntary governance.