The 2030 Agenda and its SDGs call for cross-sectoral collaboration and societal transformation. Translating these indivisible goals to the local level is an important undertaking for municipalities given their wide range of responsibilities. This paper explores SDG localization in a Swedish municipal organization, providing analyses on management practice, having an integrated approach to sustainability. Based on document studies and interviews, it reflects experiences from an early phase of SDG localization. Having an integrated approach to SDG localization was shown to be dependent on aspects such as structure, leadership and coordination, yet simultaneously flexibility, organizational learning as well as time and timing. Such an integrated approach also comes with the challenge of operationalizing the SDGs into management systems, budgets and motivating employees across organizational silos and levels. The paper concludes that the SDG framework presents an opportunity for municipalities to understand and review their organizations through a broad systems perspective on sustainability.

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The 2030 Agenda and its integrative and indivisible sustainable development goals (SDGs) challenge traditional ways of governing. Hence, collaboration across sectors, actors, and levels is fundamental in SDG localisation, where subnational levels (actors at regional and local levels) play key roles in forwarding societal transformation. The paper sheds light on the complexity of collaboration by exploring the early stages of developing multi‐actor collaboration for SDG implementation at a county level in Sweden. The analyses depart from interviews and observations. One of the main conclusions is that it is important to discuss the involved organisations' understanding and ambitions more in‐depth early on in such collaboration processes. To be able to do so, the actors need to have the capacity to see beyond their traditional roles. Moreover, the study indicates that leadership is essential in this context, but this leadership needs to be based on neutrality, which, in practise, is a challenge.

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