Hur klarar egentligen medierna att rapportera om komplicerade politiska energibeslut? Utgångspunkten i granskningen är de fem energipolitiska regeringsbeslut mellan 2003–2020 som under hösten 2023 fick svidande kritik av Riksrevisionen. Motiveringen var att besluten var dåligt underbyggda och brast i konsekvensanalys. Samma kritik skulle kunna riktas mot mediernas rapportering. Rapporten visar bland annat: De som kommer till tals i nyhetsrapporteringen är framför allt elbolagen och den politiska oppositionen.Trots att det finns mycket forskning på området, intervjuas sällan forskare. Inte heller citeras det ur de många utredningar som gjorts.Miljörörelsen är så gott som osynlig i rapporteringen. 

This book analyzes climate change from a societal risk perspective, considering IPCC data, harm reduction, and global impact. Climate change is a globalised agent of social disruption whose impacts will worsen societal inequities and inequalities around the world. For some unfortunate societies already precariously exposed, climate change will tip them into societal collapse. Devastation will also occur to many ecological values in which all societies are embedded. But effective social action can limit the extent of these costs and losses. Ultimately, only social transformation can limit the social and environmental harms of climate change. But what does this mean? To what extent is society at risk? Are such risks particularized and restricted to specific segments and localities? Or is society at risk in a more universal way? Climate risks are re-shaping the practices of households, communities, governments and businesses. In this way, climate risks are a dynamic element in social change and social processes. Risk holds a mirror to society, revealing who and what is prioritized, recognized and valued. It also provides a reckoning of our perceived strengths, vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This volume examines how we understand the societal risks of contemporary and forecast climate change impacts—and those risks inherent in dealing with these impacts. We know that society is fashioning a new global climate—but climate change is also re-fashioning society; this book explores this dynamic process and considers its implications for future society.

This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of climate emergency declarations. We focus on the case of Victoria Australia and the 30 councils who have declared a climate emergency with a particular focus on three councils. We explore the drivers, meanings, and implications and to what extent the subsequent plans reflect a reframing of local government roles and actions. We find the emergency declaration movement is catalysing councils beyond symbolic declarations potentially opening up space for change and disruption. Of interest in this paper is also the principal and theoretical implications for citizens, local government, and for research that is connected with this emerging trend. We highlight conclusions, ideas, and perspectives that can be drawn from this study of the Australian practice of climate emergency declarations.

The article describes and reflects upon how multi-level governance and planning in Sweden have been affected by and reacted upon three pending major challenges confronting humanity, namely climate change, migration and the Covid-19 pandemic. These ‘crises’ are broadly considered ‘existential threats’ in need of ‘securitisation’. Causes and adequate reactions are contested, and there are no given solutions how to securitise the perceived threats, neither one by one, no less together. Government securitisation strategies are challenged by counter-securitisation demands, and plaguing vulnerable groups in society by in-securitising predicaments. Taking Sweden as an example the article applies an analytical approach drawing upon strands of securitisation, governance and planning theory. Targeting policy responses to the three perceived crises the intricate relations between government levels, responsibilities, capacities, and actions are scrutinized, including a focus upon the role of planning. Overriding research questions are: How has the governance and planning system – central, regional and local governments - in Sweden responded to the challenges of climate change, migration and Covid-19? What threats were identified? What solutions were proposed? What consequences could be traced? What prospects wait around the corner? Comparing crucial aspects of the crises’ anatomies the article adds to the understanding of the way multilevel, cross-sectional, hybrid governance and planning respond to concurrent crises, thereby also offering clues for action in other geopolitical contexts. The article mainly draws upon recent and ongoing research on manifestations of three cases in the Swedish context. Applying a pragmatic, methodological approach combining elements of securitisation, governance and planning theories with Carol Lee Bacchi’s ‘What is the problem represented to be’ and a touch of interpretive/narrative theory, the study reveals distinct differences between the anatomies of the three crises and their handling. Urgency, extension, state of knowledge/epistemology, governance and planning make different imprints on crises management. Sweden’s long-term climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies imply slow, micro-steps forward based on a combination of social-liberal, ‘circular’ and a touch of ‘green growth’ economies. Migration policy displays a Janus face, on the one hand largely respecting the UN refugee quota system on the other hand applying a detailed regulatory framework causing severe insecurity especially for minor refugees wanting to stay and make their living in Sweden. The Covid-19 outbreak revealed a lack of foresight and eroded/fragmented responsibility causing huge stress upon personnel in elderly and health care and appalling death rates among elderly patients, although governance and planning slowly adapted through securitising policies, leading to potential de-securitisation of the issue. The three crises have caused a security wake-up among governments at all levels and the public in general, and the article concludes by discussing whether this ‘perfect storm’ of crises will result in a farewell to neoliberalism – towards a neo-regulatory state facing further challenges and crises for governance, planning and the role of planners. The tentative prospect rather indicates a mixture of context-dependent ‘hybrid governance’, thus also underlining the crucial role of planners’ role as ‘chameleons’ in complicated governance processes of politics, policy and planning.

The Swedish response to the pandemic at the national level has attracted considerable international attention, but little focus has been placed on the way municipalities dealt with the crisis. Using Hay's dimensions of politicization, namely the capacity for human agency, deliberation in the public domain, and social context, we analyze the politicization of the municipal response to the pandemic in Sweden. We do this based on the analysis of the decision making process to activate (or not) an extraordinary crisis management committee. We find inter alia, that (i) only a quarter of the municipalities activated the committee while a majority of them had an alternate special organization in place; (ii) support to the existing organizational structure was more salient than creating an extraordinary organization, and (iii) a robust municipal structure was deemed to be one able to withstand shocks without resorting to extraordinary governance arrangements. We find a 'conditioned politicization' of the response, privileging administration over politics.

Sustainability and sustainable development are political and essentially contested social phenomena. Despite this ambiguity, they continue to hold a central position as apolitical concepts in much of social science and policy making. In Europe, public procurement is increasingly used as a tool to reach sustainability, a fact that actualizes an inherent tension between politically charged objectives on the one hand, and technological processes and market logics on the other. Therefore, in this article, we investigate this tension by studying policies relating to sustainable public procurement of the built environment in the EU. We argue that governing any policy domain entails the construction and representation of particular policy problems. Hence, we focus on how the 'problems' of sustainable public procurement are represented in EU policy guidance and best practice documents. Our analysis shows that these central policy documents are dominated by a problem representation where unsustainability is constructed as technical design flaws and market failure. This has the primary effect that it renders sustainable development as, primarily, a technical issue, and beyond politics. Therefore, we conclude that current policy reproduces 'weak' forms of sustainable development, where the practice is depoliticized and premised upon continued growth and innovation.

n the spring of 2020, many municipalities were taken by surprise by effects of the Corona pandemic on services and management. The Corona pandemic was defined as an extraordinary event and staff functions and crisis management committees were activated. The analysis is framed by the concept of electoral democracy and counter-democracy. The purpose of the article is to shed light on how two differ-ent institutional logics, one related to extraordinary events and the other related to freedom of information and whistle-blower protection for public employees. The case showed a clash between these logics. Even in an open democratic system, an extraordinary event can mean that the dissemination of information is limited. This could mean that democratic legitimacy is at risk. However, a crisis management system with complete transparency in all decision-making is neither possible nor desirable

This article builds on the field of collaborative crisis management, a mix of collaborative public management (CPM) and crisis management (CM). A field that often focuses on large-scale threats, sometimes labelled societal challenges, whose impacts are broad and cross-cutting and impacts many actors in society and drives demand for collaboration. In this study, we are interested in events that have broad and disastrous impacts on soci- ety, high degrees of uncertainty and potentially cascading effects and we study this through an in-depth case study of collaborative crisis manage- ment tasked with contingency planning for dam failure risk in a large river basin in central Sweden. We find that there was a lack in reach of the col- laboration potentially limiting capacity and capacity building in ways that can limit preparedness and increase vulnerability in a crisis situation. We also found that contingency planning was treated as a demarcated project with a beginning and an end and not entirely as a continuous process. Both these observations go against the basic principles of contingency planning. Hence, there is a need to acknowledge and abridge varying lev- els of organisational capacity and build/maintain awareness within and between the organisations and actors involved. This study shows that the practice of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning is both complex and complicated. The article has the potential to aid policy-mak- ers in the field to pinpoint central aspects of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning that needs to be addressed in order to mitigate limits to preparedness and increased vulnerability in a crisis situation. A deeper knowledge on these challenges and problems can also support progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal 9 (especially in relation to the aspect of building resilient infrastructure) through its empir- ical focus on infrastructure failure in terms of dam failure.