To Örebro University

The maintenance of biodiversity by securing representative and well-connected habitat networks in managed landscapes requires a wise combination of protection, management, and restoration of habitats at several scales. We suggest that the integration of natural and social sciences in the form of "Two-dimensional gap analysis" is an efficient tool for the implementation of biodiversity policies. The tool links biologically relevant "horizontal" ecological issues with "vertical" issues related to institutions and other societal issues. Using forest biodiversity as an example, we illustrate how one can combine ecological and institutional aspects of biodiversity conservation, thus facilitating environmentally sustainable regional development. In particular, we use regional gap analysis for identification of focal forest types, habitat modelling for ascertaining the functional connectivity of "green infrastructures", as tools for the horizontal gap analysis. For the vertical dimension we suggest how the social sciences can be used for assessing the success in the implementation of biodiversity policies in real landscapes by identifying institutional obstacles while implementing policies. We argue that this interdisciplinary approach could be applied in a whole range of other environments including other terrestrial biota and aquatic ecosystems where functional habitat connectivity, nonlinear response to habitat loss and a multitude of economic and social interests co-occur in the same landscape.

Greening public organizations demands the acknowledgment and reconciliation of tensions and conflicts between core values. This is a challenge that public pension funds have come to face as the call for sustainability has reached the finance sector. Building on the value pluralism debate and institutional theory this article provides a theoretical elaboration of strategies for managing value conflict in public organizations, discussing how value conflict management may promote or inhibit institutional change. The empirical analysis explores how sustainability-related value conflicts are managed within Swedish public pension funds. Political goals and ideals of sustainable finance are pushing funds to promote sustainability through their investments, thus, to consider and promote further values than financial return. Previous research has mainly focused on the financial profitability of sustainability concerns. This study shows that economic value calculation remains the dominant approach within funds, downplaying any conflict between environmental and financial goals. However, to maintain institutional legitimacy under increasing external pressure, the funds have implemented complementary strategies, such as organizational separation of value-related tasks, and different principles for prioritizing value-based actions. The funds thereby avoid ethical reasoning which they fear would lead to subjectivity. In conclusion, the implications for organizational change are discussed.

Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

Are public pension funds taking sustainability values into serious consideration? This question is addressed by analyzing annual reports of The Council on Ethics in the Swedish public pension system, which has a clear mission from The Swedish Government to consider sustainability values. The council was established in 2007 and supports four funds with advice. This article studies empirically how the council’s expression of words connected to different values has changed over time as well as how it practically reasons in situations of value conflicts. The quantitative data shows that words indicative of “sustainability values” have considerably increased. As a contrast, the critical discourse analysis shows that the council often reasons in a general, loose way about preferable solutions, while more practical claims for action are largely lacking or are vague in relation to sustainable development. The underlying rationale is very much in line with the discourse of economic rationalism. Thus, the quantitative findings suggest an emerging sustainability discourse, while the qualitative analysis clearly indicates that an economic rationale continues to underpin the council’s practical reasoning. However, it is concluded that this is not a simple case of green washing documents but rather a slow train moving towards green institutional change.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore and elaborate on how institutional conditions work to the advantage and disadvantage of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies on different levels in two countries.

Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative case study design is used to study empirically two countries with very different traditions when it comes to political-administrative institutions: Argentina and Sweden.

Findings: As expected, the institutional foundations of DRR policy in Sweden are shown to be more consistent and stable than in Argentina. However, this difference is of less importance when considering the crucial role of local practices. National institutional foundations can function as support–but is not a necessary condition–for building disaster preparedness on the ground. The authors argue that national governments cannot do without institutionalized praxis-based preparedness, which is vital for both effective emergency management and learning.

Originality/value: This paper contributes to the disaster research debate by elaborating on institutional arrangements that can facilitate or hinder DRR strategies in a multi-level context. The main argument is that institutional practices on the ground are important to compensate for insufficient national institutions, either because they are weak or too distant from practical DRR. The authors also elaborate on how institutional practices can function as a source for learning and for building legitimate practical authority from the bottom up.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is assessed and elaborated by applying it to the Swedish forestry policy subsystem, a dynamic subsystem in which environmental interests have challenged a dominating production coalition. Forest policy has changed as new ecological values and modes of governing have been introduced through an incremental, pragmatic learning process mediated by a pre-established partnership culture. This policy change is not satisfactorily explained by conventional ACF mechanisms (shocks and brokered learning). Policy change may be better understood if the ACF is nuanced and contextualised by recognising that the learning process has evolved over a long time within the ideological-discursive context of ecological modernisation, and that the forest sector has been under constant pressure due to its strong dependence on world markets.

This book considers how public sector institutions can be transformed to better support sustainable development by exploring the concept of green inside activism and its importance for institutional change. The phenomenon of inside activism has been shown to be crucial for green policy change and this book focuses on public officials as green inside activists, committed to green values and engaged in social movement, acting strategically from inside public administration to change public policy and institutions in line with such value commitment. The book theorizes how green inside activism can contribute to a more sustainable development through institutional change. This theorizing builds on and relates to highly relevant theoretical arguments in the existing literature. The authors also consider the legitimacy of inside activism and how it can be reconciled with democratic ideals. This innovative work will appeal to students and scholars of public policy, political science and environmental politics.

This article assesses the possibility of implementing biodiversity policies using voluntary, informative policy instruments. The case is the Swedish forest sector, a policy area where vital national economic interests as well as important ecological values are at stake. The results show that informative policy instruments affect the behaviour of forest owners by providing advice and raising awareness but do not change underlying values and preferences. Sustainability through good advice is an important practice with limited effects, at least in the short run. Private regulations (certifications) have a relatively powerful influence on forest owners and complement the public informative policy instruments, implying that the forest sector can be depicted as private governance with government.

With this paper we aim to further our understanding of local environmental governing by analysing green inside activists who use expert-based authority, networks, and a professional position within public administration to green government policy and action from the inside. Using new survey data, we identify and analyse who these actors are and whether they matter for local environmental governing in Sweden. The results show that green inside activists operate within 23% of the Swedish municipalities and that these municipalities score higher on three different measurements of environmental governing performance, which supports the conclusion that green inside activists do make a difference. We also show that green inside activists differ from other public officials working with environmental issues in that they are more frequently involved in policy making, have more extensive horizontal and vertical networks, and promote societal changes to a greater degree. We end by raising key questions concerning the democratic legitimacy of these actors.

Green radicalism among local environmental officials in Sweden is examined with the aims of theoretically elaborating on different dimensions of Green radicalism in the context of public administration, exploring the dimensionality of Green radicalism among officials, and examining the extent to which Green radicalism is associated with policy influence. Three types of Green radicalism are identified: Green ethics, Green institutional change, and Green activism. Survey data (N=701) show that the three theoretical dimensions are present among officials, and that there is no negative association between radicalism and influence. It is primarily officials with Green activism beliefs who perceive themselves as able to influence policy. These findings suggest a need for more nuanced understanding of and further studies into the role of public administration in the quest for more radical Green reforms.

Public organizations In the 21^stcentury, are increasingly complex in terms of multiple institutional rules, norms, and practices. This complexity constitutes a difficult challenge for civil servants to find and determine appropriate identities, roles and relationships in their everyday work.  For this special issue we made a call for scholars to contribute new addressing the roles of civil servants within increasingly complex public sector organizations, focusing on a couple of interrelated research questions:

• What is the nature of public administration taking into consideration increasing institutional complexity in terms of persistent bureaucratic traditions, new public management solutions, participatory ideals, activist sentiments among officials and so forth?
• What are the consequences of this institutional complexity for the possibility of preserving a coherent, rule-governed public administration and what does public mean today in public administration?
• What types of roles are civil servants playing in relation to different institutional rules and norms and various categories of actor (politicians, citizens, organizations) and how do they handle frictions and conflicts?
• What type of conceptions of civil servants’ roles are developing, including public service ethics? What alternative and contesting role-conceptions and ethics are prevalent and supported?

This introduction should be understood as being both a summary of the current state of research in relation to civil service – its predicaments and challenges – as well as being a suggestion for future attention among scholars and practitioners. We have thus written this introduction not only with the purpose of summarizing the main components inherent in the six articles that are included in this special issue but with the hope of also spurring discussions concerning what civil service has been, currently seems to be and might become in the future.

Organizational reforms in public administration have been high on the agenda for decades. A popular type is the municipal service center (MSC) gathering citizen–government interaction in one location, physically and virtually. Previous research has mainly focused on the organizational solution and operation of MSCs. This article contributes by using a processual approach to study how priorities are handled during a reform process with fundamental effects and consequences for the organizational solution. The article is based on a deep case study of a MSC in a mid-sized Swedish municipality. The empirical data comprise documents and 29 interviews with politicians, managing directors, and other key actors. We discern a number of process factors and analyze the process in relation to four key priorities: organizational change or organizational solution, efficiency or democracy values, politicians or administrators as key actors, and citizens as customers or co-creators. The article also relates the priorities to more comprehensive public administration perspectives in the literature such as NPM and more citizen-centered perspectives. The results show that the process was characterized by a view of citizens as service-recipients and customers; a focus on efficiency and the MSC as an organizational solution, and a process pushed forward by leading public administrators with a significant influence over vital value priorities. 

Reforms and re-organizations in public administration are today common features in our society. One particularly popular form of re-organization is that of the municipal service center gathering communication activities, such as reception desks and customer services at various administrative units/sectors, in one location, physically as well as on the Internet and social media. Some proponents of this organizational reform point to democratic gains and others to efficiency and effectiveness. The purpose of this article is to scrutinize the process of organizing and implementing a municipal service center in a mid-size Swedish municipality. The empirical data consists of public documents and 29 semi-structured interviews with politicians, managing directors and other key actors. The results show that the studied MSC had a relatively narrow NPM-inspired design, which does not represent the municipality as a political-democratic organization. Values like efficiency and easy access were prioritized, while democratic values were not properly addressed as expected in a democratic organization. The article examines the process from initiation to the opening of the service center, and discerns four essential dilemmas. These dilemmas concern the value-priorities made such as focusing on the re-organization process or the product, customer or citizen, politicians or bureaucrat, and efficiency or deliberation. The process of prioritization led to a municipal service center that lacked some of the main ingredients such as e-services and satellite offices. The MSC can thus be viewed as a boat that will be completed and possibly rebuilt at sea.

One of the basic tasks in governing our society is to identity and to build an efficient and well-functioning system for public administration. Therefore it is rather natural that we see a constant flow of public administration reforms and re-organization trends. These trends can take different forms and the challenges in the implementation and legitimation processes varies depending on which level we are examining. Reforms within the municipal administration are often affected by local preconditions concerning for instance geography, demography, local culture, and local politics. Nonetheless, municipalities are also recipients and producers of ideas in a global diffusion of reform trends.

Citizen-local government interaction is one of those areas under constant scrutiny. How municipalities communicate with and deliver service to citizens have always been areas of constant development, influenced by for instance democratic and technological innovations. The interaction has been guided by different organizational trends over the years such as community centers located in different geographical areas, citizen centers located in municipal buildings such as libraries, or reception desks at every administrative unit. These organizational forms have often been combined with a traditional switchboard. In recent years, municipalities have absorbed a new organizational form of communicating and interacting with citizens – citizen service centers – CSCs. The idea is to gather all reception desks, switchboards, and various citizen centers to one geographical location, one phone number and one home page. This is a major re-organization of citizen-government interaction and in such a process a number of choices have to be made, often related to various dilemmas and values.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and dilemmas during the process of establishing a municipal service center in a medium sized Swedish municipality. What are the main values at stake during the process? What is the relation between problem framing, motives and solutions along the way? The focus of the paper is threefold: to overview the process of establishing a municipal service center; to explore what values prevail during the process and why; and to discuss the dilemma of executing the re-organization without having solved all the relevant problems. This paper aims to contribute mainly to the field of public management reform.

The conclusions are based on 29 semi-structured interviews with municipal politicians on several levels, managing directors of all the administrative units, and other key actors in this process of re-organization. The interviews were performed during 2013 and 2014.

Under de senaste 15 åren har över 80 svenska kommuner gått från en traditionell växelverksamhet till en mer integrerad serviceyta, ofta kallad kontaktcenter, kundtjänst, medborgarservice, servicecenter, kundcenter eller liknande. Denna typ av organisationsform kallas även internationellt för ”one-stop shops” dit en medborgare kan vända sig med en mångfald av frågor och ärenden. Under de senaste 3 åren har forskare vid Örebro universitet arbetat med att utöka kunskapen om den första kontakten mellan medborgare och myndigheter, främst genom att studera kommunala servicecenter i Sverige. Rapporten bygger på en enkätundersökning genomförd under 2015 och 2016 och syftet är att ge en översikt över framväxten av denna typ av kommunala center. Vilka är de underliggande behoven som driver framväxten av dessa center? Hur sprids dessa idéer? Vilka aktörer är de mest framträdande? Varför sprids dessa center just idag? Är framväxten av dessa center inspirerade av liknande organisationsformer i privat verksamhet? Är etableringen av dessa center ett tecken på demokratiinriktade kommunala initiativ och ett tydligare medborgarfokus i offentlig förvaltning? Denna typ av kommunala one-stop shops är en till synes liten del av den kommunala verksamheten men kan således kopplas till en rad viktiga principiella frågor om offentlig förvaltning.

This article examines the EU structural fund system from a democratic point of view and starts theorizing on the nature of basic democracy problems. The analysis is guided by a parliamentary, a pluralistic and an élite-democratic model. None of these models seems to fit well with how the system works in practice, summarized as top-down and technocratic with important vertical co-ordination between administrative levels, which tends to marginalize the role of democratic institutions. Five types of fundamental problem are identified and analysed in terms of democracy paradoxes (multi-level, vertical, economic, horizontal, multi-demos). It is difficult to dissolve these paradoxes because they reflect existing structural fund institutions. In order to democratize, they need to be challenged, either by regulating partnerships in a more democratic way or by challenging the partnership principle with the parliamentary principle.