Like many other countries, Sweden has decentralized and regionalized the design and implementation of many policies over the past two decades. This has added complexity to an already very decentralized structure where local governments have great autonomy within an elaborate and long-standing system of multilevel governance. Ten years ago, the main strategy to bring coherence was to encourage networking regionally and locally, which meant further variety and loss of central coordination.
Since 2006 the central government has regained control over some areas like labor market policy. At the same time the government has designed a new organization for the EU structural funds which increases complexities. In a study 2012 we found that the structural funds operate as parallel organizations for the funding of infrastructure. They are more centralized than the national organization/network for infrastructure funding and they generally don’t build on the regional strategies and analyses developed for Swedish policies. There is a great risk of competitive games rather than cooperation and, hence, suboptimality. The situation is much the same for the Interreg-programs in Scandinavia, where cross-country organizational structures make it even more difficult to take action to redesign programs if problems occur.
Regional development is a particularly complex area, where resources have to be combined across organizational boundaries and levels (infrastructure, support for SMEs, labor market policy, continuing education etc). Many countries encourage partnerships and/or regionalize policies to be integrated by regional and local leaders. Some countries develop their systems of public management to allow for jointly owned targets or cross-cutting reviews of complex issues where responsibility is difficult to divide up. Sweden has generally opted for the first, while maintain a rigid model of NPM.
The paper will present a Swedish case study of two rival multilevel arrangements and place it within the theoretical frameworks of the panel.
