Till Örebro universitet

Cross-sectoral governance has become a prominent feature of contemporary public sector reform. Across policy areas such as sustainability, integration, unemployment, and crime prevention, public organizations are increasingly expected to assemble governmental and non-governmental actors into collective responses to societal challenges. In these arrangements, dispersed actors with fragmented mandates, uneven capacities, and no single center of authority are nonetheless expected to act collectively, assume responsibility, and respond to an expanding range of societal problems.

Drawing on world society theory and an interpretive synthesis of four studies of Swedish cross-sectoral governance networks, this thesis develops the concept of cross-sectoral actorhood. Cross-sectoral actorhood denotes the institutional process through which cross-sectoral governance arrangements come to be attributed and to sustain the qualities of a purposeful, capable, and morally responsible actor. Cross-sectoral actorhood is not an inherent property of such governance arrangements, but an ongoing institutional accomplishment, expressed and sustained through ambiguous institutional scripts, ceremonial infrastructures, and distributed enactments that render them recognizable as legitimate actors within a rationalized cultural order.

The central contribution of the thesis is to reframe cross-sectoral governance not as a neutral mode of problem-solving, but as a cultural stage: a site in which what counts as a pressing societal challenge and who counts as a responsible actor are continuously shaped. This theoretical move opens a critical space for examining not only how cross-sectoral actorhood is institutionally accomplished, but also its normative and political consequences. It shows how responsibility can be made visible and attributable while remaining distributed and unsettled, and foregrounds the political ordering processes through which particular configurations of problems and actors become actionable and legitimate, selectively privileging certain interpretations against a background of apparent consensus.