Connecting Municipal and Regional Level Planning: Analysis and Visualization of Sustainability Indicators in Bergslagen, Sweden

Abstract

Sustainable development as a process towards sustainability requires collaboration among societal actors and stakeholders at multiple levels. A key issue is to provide them with that they have comprehensive and transparent knowledge base representing the state and trends of different dimensions of sustainability. This study addresses the need to analyse and present data of sustainability as a foundation for the sustainable development process within municipalities, and among them. As a case study, we focus on 18 municipalities in the crisis-struck Bergslagen region in Sweden and compare them with 101 surrounding municipalities. Data from 2001 and 2006 on 15 indicators representing ecological, economic and social sustainability criteria were transformed to a common scale through normalization around the median, and summarized. Bergslagen region municipalities performed poorer than the surrounding ones for all dimensions in 2006. The change from 2001 to 2006 was positive for economic and social criteria, while the ecological dimension developed negatively in all municipalities. We stress the need for municipalities to collaborate with each other and other actors both at municipal and regional levels, and to use sustainability indicators as a base for informed planning processes. We propose visualization of indicators using maps to support decision-making and social learning.

Opportunities for Integrated Landscape Planning – the Broker, the Arena, the Tool

“…Different authorities are responsible for various, often overlapping, components and functions of a landscape, and have unclear roles and mandates considering the landscape as a whole. This is particularly obvious on national and regional levels, in contrast to local level where municipality agencies are expected to exercise holistic considerations in their comprehensive plans (Andersson et al 2013;. Furthermore, there is often an incoherency in how various sector policies interpret the concept of 'landscape' (Esselin 2014).…”

“…However, in Sweden, as in many other countries, the sectorial responsibilityframe is deeply rooted in the system of public administration. This has resulted in a planning paradigm where the regulatory authorities act independently of each other (Andersson et al 2013;Beland Lindahl et al 2017;Hysing 2009) and thus where the multifunctional components that characterises, e.g., rural planning (Gallent et al 2004), are reduced or absent. Consequently, forestry, agriculture, infrastructure, nature conservation, energy production and reindeer husbandry sectors, which are dominant in northern Sweden, are planned separately without integration (Esselin 2014;Sandström & Lindkvist 2009).…”

“…Along the lines of Margerum (2002) but more applied, Andersson et al (2013) identified three main problems regarding the implementation of collaborative approaches on the municipality level in Sweden:…”

“…We complemented the theoretical categorisation of obstacles identified by Margerum (2002) with the problems in a Swedish municipal context identified by Andersson et al (2013) Andersson et al (2013) could be done in several ways, where we chose, in our opinion, the most clear connection to create an illustrative example (see Table 2), even though the barriers interact with each other.…”

“…The large number of private non-industrial forest (NIPF) owners 1 in Sweden is a contributing factor (Andersson et al 2013;Angelstam et al 2015;Forsberg 2012) to the sectorial "isolation" in the forestry sector. Although diversity in objectives and behaviour may be expected (cf.…”