“Take It or Leave It”: From Collaborative to Regulative Developer Dialogues in Six Swedish Municipalities Aiming to Climate-Proof Urban Planning

Abstract

Enhancing legitimacy and effectiveness of climate policy requires improved interactions between and within administrative levels, the latter including horizontal public–private coordination. In the heavily decentralized Swedish urban planning process, developer dialogues are used to enhance collaboration and thereby increase the climate-proofing of new housing districts. In practice, municipalities struggle with identifying what types of collaborative arrangements best support the realization of climate goals, in light of strong property developer interests and bargaining. Based on qualitative interviews with coordinating planners, this paper illustrates lessons from repeated collaborative practices in six Swedish municipalities. We analytically characterize a shift between first- and second-generation developer dialogues. In first-generation dialogues, coordinators attempted to ensure jointly agreed upon principles, priorities and commitments, which instead resulted in troublesome negotiations. In second-generation dialogues, coordinators used mixed approaches to ensure more competitive and climate-proof urban development by mechanisms of indirect command and control. Principles of collaborative interaction were abandoned to regain control over urban planning. This documented shift contrasts heavily with theoretical assumptions from the climate governance literature, where enhanced collaboration assumedly increase effectiveness of climate policy implementation. Acknowledging the practical implications of using developer dialogues to climate-proof urban planning in different settings is critical for improved policy implementation.

Public Perceptions concerning Responsibility for Climate Change Adaptation

“…However, the result shows that they believe property owners (S4) and companies (S14, S15) also need to take on responsibility for societal adaptation. This indicates that the result corresponds with the academic studies calling for a shared public-private responsibility [5,7,9]. These results reflect current Swedish legislation, placing responsibility on local governments and property owners, and also reflect the result of the public investigation from 2017, coming to the conclusion that property owners have an unreasonably large responsibility [40].…”

“…37% reported total or nearly total agreement (levels 6 or 7), while only 13% reported that they totally or nearly totally disagreed. Almost half of the respondents (49%) ended up in one of the middle levels (3)(4)(5) or answered "don't know". Even within the mid-range, the distribution is fairly right-skewed.…”

“…One pertinent issue for successful climate change adaptation is how responsibility is to be divided within society and who is going to do what. These issues have been raised in the adaptation literature, highlighting the need for governance solutions including multi-level [2][3][4][5] and multi-actor responsibility [3,[5][6][7][8]. A particular focus in the literature concerns the need to involve both public and private actors for adaptation measures to function well [6,7,[9][10][11][12].…”

Stakeholder Legitimization of the Provision of Emergency Centralized Accommodations to Displaced Persons

“…However, given the limited existing information about decision-making for centralized accommodations in emergency contexts, this study is a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge [69]. For instance, existing studies have validated that meaningful information can be drawn from small sample sets (e.g., [48][49][50]). Many patterns of decision-making and themes discussed in interviews were common regardless of the informants' backgrounds, but future research could assess how such backgrounds affect decision-making in a context such as the one studied here.…”

“…A qualitative analysis of these interviews was used to identify trends and emergent themes in decision-making processes in a context about which existing information is scarce [46,47]. Similar methods of qualitative analysis of interviews were used in previous studies and were proven successful in identifying patterns in stakeholder perspectives (e.g., [48][49][50]; these studies used between seven and 15 semi-structured interviews). More specifically, qualitative coding was used to capture interviews' "primary content[s] and essence" [51] (page 4) and "retrieve and categorize data that are similar in meaning" [52].…”