To Örebro University

The Nordic countries are often portrayed as frontrunners in sustainable development, combining high environmental ambitions with strong welfare systems and relatively high levels of public transport use. Yet transport remains a persistent and complex challenge. Emissions from the transport sector continue to be substantial, car dependency is deeply embedded in everyday mobility practices, and questions of accessibility, affordability and social justice have gained increasing attention. Addressing these challenges requires not only technological innovation and behavioral change, but also institutional arrangements capable of coordinating transport and land-use planning across scales and sectors.

In this context, collaborative governance has become a central feature of contemporary transport planning. In particular, the rescaling of planning responsibilities from local to regional levels has intensified the need for coordination between actors operating within different territorial and institutional logics. This essay reflects on the Swedish case of rescaled public transport planning and situates it within broader Nordic and European debates on soft and hard governance, multilevel planning and sustainable mobility transitions. It argues that rescaling has contributed to the emergence of penumbral planning spaces: hybrid governance arrangements that are neither fully formalized nor entirely informal but instead occupy an ambiguous middle ground between hard and soft spaces.