Over the past few decades, Sweden has established itself as a "world leader" in gender equality. Alongside this development, Swedish politicians have also initiated ambitious plans that aim to establish the country as "world class" in terms of digitalization. International research shows that women and racialized groups are in a minority in the design processes, that AI facial recognition systems are built with white male faces as the norm, and that digital tools replicate racial injustices. In this paper, we are interested in if, and if so how, gender equality is articulated and thus filled with meaning in national policies on AI and digitalization. The overall aim is to discuss the potential of gender (equality) mainstreaming to challenge systems of privilege in the implementation of AI systems in the public sector. The paper analyses how gender equality is filled with meaning in national policy documents on AI and gender equality.The main findings show that gender equality is turned into a question of lack of knowledge and information, which in turn blocks out an understanding of gender equality as something that is related to gendered power relations.

In this article, we conduct a governmentality analysis of Swedish public procurement in order to show how the notion of sustainability is constructed in this circumstance. We argue that the mainstream approach to sustainability policy in most countries lies within capitalist market rationalities, thus making it crucial to study how such rationalities shape and represent the problems of unsustainability and how these "problems" limit the possibilities for politics and policy in practice. Furthermore, public procurement is a central instrument through which these rationalities are realised and maintained. Thus, the purpose is to examine how problems of unsustainability are represented through public procurement policy and the effects they constitute for the politics of sustainability. To this end we mobilise the Foucauldian based "what's the problem represented to be" approach. As data, we use policy documents published with respect to public procurement in Sweden. Our findings show that the dominant problem representation constructs unsustainability as a market failure, limiting the possibilities for politics and policies of sustainability in several ways. This includes premising sustainability upon the continued expansion of capitalism; constituting the agents of change as apolitical actors; making sustainability a voluntary ambition for the procuring organisations; and constructing the legitimate claim to earth's resources and sinks as a matter of purchasing power, with important implications for environmental justice. However, our analysis also shows a tension in the material creating openings for a politicisation of the representations of sustainability.

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.

The context of sub-national regions in Sweden is used to illustrate how rankings and indices operate as part of contemporary governing of space and territory. An empirical study of an index designed to measure the innovative capacity of these regions is presented to illustrate how such numerical devices are invoked as part of policy by providing policy-makers with a means to define reality, guide strategy and legitimize certain actions. Drawing on both the literatures of governmentality and the sociology of quantification, the construction of the index and its deployment into politics are examined with a focus on the performative aspects of mobilizing such technologies in governing. The analysis shows how an instrument intended as a learning tool for regions and regional policy-makers turns into a device through which power operates in the processes of marking, grading and commensuration, in turn reinforcing established orders among the regions. Following from this, it is found that such numerical devices are important governmental technologies that help relay and institute political rationalities. Therefore, they should be considered more carefully in any analysis of discourses of regional development, which is a field permeated by rationalities of innovation and competitiveness.

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