Is Welfare on the Agenda? Barriers for Coordination of Air Quality Impacts on Welfare and Social Equality in the Nordic Countries

Policy makers and research increasingly stress the effects of air pollution for human health and wellbeing, as well as for nature and city environments. Air quality is affected by local transport, industries and wood stove use, and by activities at regional and global scale, and thus requires coordination across levels of policy making. Also, e.g. the national Danish Health Agency recognizes a subtle but significant interaction between health and social inequality (Danish Health Agency, 2011) which at a more generic level reflects an uneven distribution of health effects and environmental risks and amenities. Both health inequality and air pollution are complex problem issues and involve several area of local government. Thus, policies to manage welfare impacts of air pollution reaches across traditional silos of policy making and call for coordination of political agendas and issues of e.g. air quality policy, transport, welfare and health. Recognition of the uneven distribution of welfare impacts is however not broad at local nor national level of policy making which in the literature can be explained by incoherence i.e. different/competing interests and objectives among policy institutions, lacuna i.e. lack of orgnisational responsibility (Peters,1998) , and by compartmentalization of policy making i.e. lack of policy integration (Adelle and Russell, 2013). Additionally, welfare is in the Nordic welfare states recognized to entail opportunities and ability to take advantage of these over different life phases (Kvist et al, 2012). In this study, we examine how the Nordic perception of welfare affect the ways in which uneven distribution of air pollution related health impacts are included in policy making across levels of policy making from national to local levels and in relevant sector policies. The study is based on a processual conceptualisation of coordination (Candel and Biesbroek 2016) with emphasis on building institutional structures and practices to address cross-sector and cross-level issues. Using a comparative study, we examine cases from the five Nordic countries that all are relatively small countries with similar approach to social equality (welfare state model), while they differ in terms of local governance structure, de-/centralization of environmental and health governance, relation to EU, and in the scale of health effects of air pollution.