Unexpected bedfellows and rivaling friends: how actors’ different stakes in complex environmental problems lead to both collaborating and competing interest coalitions

Many contemporary environmental problems span several different policy sectors.

For example, conservation of critical habitats typically comes with implications for forestry management, public infrastructure, and energy provisioning.

Practitioners and scholars alike emphasize that success in addressing environmental problems thus crucially depend on how well policies are integrated (a.k.a. coordinated) across adjacent sectors. Acquiring cross-sectoral policy integration, however, presents a tremendous governance challenge.

To develop a better understanding of if and how effective policy integration could be accomplished, it is commonly argued that researchers and practitioners alike need to zoom out and look beyond single policies.

This proposal follows these calls and will investigate why policy integration aiming to address environmental problems often struggle.

But it will also study if and how policy integration can be accomplished, and how the costs and benefits deriving from these accomplishments are distributed among actors.

Five different cases in Sweden at the municipal- or county level will be studied following a comparative and mixed-methods approach.

Cases that have experienced both conflict and collaboration in relation to complex environmental problems related to various land uses will be selected.

These investigations will help uncovering factors stimulating actors to jointly engage in effective cross-sector policy integration addressing environmental problems.