This paper analyses the policy implementation of local crime prevention and community safety programmes in Sweden. It focuses on the clash between the transnational idea-complex and the national context, i.e. the unavoidable policy paradoxes of a transnational idea diffusion, and how they are made sense of when handled at local level. In particular, it emphasizes how actors in socioeconomically different local contexts within the same urban area have partly different reasons and motives for implementation. By using a sensemaking approach, this article contributes to the understanding of how convergence at national level is followed by divergence at local level.

Abstract:Internationally, there has been a general trend towards crime prevention and community safety measures. The main policy ideas and instruments associated with this trend have spread widely in Western countries. This article examines the Swedish national crime prevention policy. As Sweden is a welfare society with a long tradition of social crime prevention, it is of great interest to explore to what extent the aforementioned trend has influenced its crime prevention policy. We do this by examining Sweden's national policy and how its concepts have spread to the local level-specifically, to municipalities and their local crime prevention councils. We find that there has been a preventive shift in Sweden, although not as far-reaching as in many other European countries. Substantial changes have occurred in the understanding and direction of crime prevention work, and the question is to what extent this development will continue.

PostprintThis is the accepted version of a paper published in Critical Policy Studies. This paper has been peerreviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination.Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Persson, M. (2015) A policy problem that cannot escape its past: constraints on the reformation of safety policy.Critical Policy Studies, 9(2): 158-176 https://doi.org/10. 1080/19460171.2014.971038 Access to the published version may require subscription. AbstractWithin many current policy theories there is a tendency to first identify change and then explain it. A retrospective analysis of policy changes risks missing continuous processes and struggles for change as well as mechanisms of resistance to change. Taking this as a point of departure, this paper develops an understanding of the policy process as a struggle over meaning, as a way to allow for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of policy change and continuity. This approach is illustrated by an analysis of the formation of public safety policy in Sweden. Alternative storylines giving 'new' meanings to the policy problem were strategically incorporated into the policy discourse. However, it is found that an ideational path-dependency of the policy constrains the possibility for problem reformulation and thereby also the possibility for policy change. The discourses that instantiated the policy problem not only affect the ways in which the problem is rendered thinkable for the purposes of its government, but also for policy analysts as well as the public. The analysis shows that it is crucial to understand the interrelations between different discourses (within policy, politics and research) to understand the mechanisms of policy change and continuity.

The segregated nature of urban areas reflects an uneven exposure to risk and unsafety. This article analyzes the relevance of place to people’s feelings of unsafety by comparing questionnaire responses from people living in a segregated, disadvantaged neighbourhood to a random sample of people living in the same city. The results suggest that the central factors explaining the individual’s feelings of unsafety differ in this particular neighbourhood compared to the broader population. The article shows that place has a moderating effect on feelings of unsafety. Trust in public institutions is argued to be particularly important in segregated, disadvantaged neighbourhoods because of its potential to prevent feelings of unsafety.