Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
In the Swedish climate debate of the early 2010s, it was common to find expressions of concern that decarbonisation of the transport sector posed an intractable problem for policymakers. Transport caused a third of Sweden’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet the Transport Administration made infrastructural plans that appeared to disregard the goal of achieving a climate-neutral transport sector before 2030 (Axelsson and Lindgren, 2014). When the group commissioned by the state to suggest new environmental targets reported its findings in 2016, it identified transport as an area of particular concern, and therefore proposed a sector-specific target amounting to a 70% reduction in emissions from 2010 to 2030 (Wijkman et al., 2016). In 2017, all political parties in Parliament except the Swedish Democrats voted to adopt a climate policy framework establishing the goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, including the target of a 70% reduction in transport emissions before 2030 (Olsson and Rosén, 2018). While the new targets were broadly welcomed, critical voices were soon heard, pointing out a discrepancy between the proposed visions and the concrete progress that could be seen. Climate progressives especially highlighted the need for a fundamental reorientation of transport planning and state investment policy, away from fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructures towards a decarbonised transport system (Sandahl et al., 2019).
While these critical voices suggested disillusionment with the status quo, there were by now some indications that the discursive landscape had begun to shift. After 2015, it was possible to hear CEOs of large companies urging the government to political action, and environmentalists talking warmly of green reindustrialisation. A thorough repoliticisation of transport decarbonisation was underway, in which actors who had previously occupied widely separated political positions found common ground demanding that the state must take centre stage in the decarbonisation of the transport system. When the Covid pandemic arrived to upset all assumptions about the free market’s self-corrective powers, such demands increased further.
Driving these shifts in the discourse was a struggle between different ideas about the state, and about the modern political history of Sweden. In this paper, we investigate how this discursive struggle took form in Sweden between 2008 and 2021, through two economic crises, and how it resulted in a new and historically unique discourse coalition. Our aim is to describe the appearance of this new discourse coalition, and to explain it as resulting from the mobilisation of a specific conceptualisation of the state, as well as a response by key actors to the impasse in transport decarbonisation.
We argue that Sweden is a particularly interesting case to study when searching for competing ideas about transport decarbonisation. The forms and functions of the highly developed welfare state that evolved in Sweden from the 1950s have been fundamentally changed by political-economic events in more recent decades. Tendencies towards market liberalisation that had started even earlier were amplified by the restructurings that followed the severe economic crisis in the early 1990s (Erixon, 2011; Schön, 2007). The welfare state has since been under continuous pressure to reform and retreat, in line with the prerogatives of neoliberal ideology and fiscal conservatism. Meanwhile, Sweden’s history during the same period is one of significant success in terms of decarbonisation, with reductions in the use of fossil fuels, especially in domestic heating and the electricity system, seeing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions halve between 1970 and 2010 (e.g. Lindmark and Andersson, 2010; cf. Friström, 2017). This success has reinforced Sweden’s reputation for progressiveness in environmental policy (Lundqvist, 2004). The transport sector stands out, however, as the one area where progress in emissions reductions has been difficult to achieve, as frequently noted in state reports (e.g. SGOR, 2013; STA, 2017).
For these reasons, Sweden could be seen as a “paradigmatic” case in Flyvbjerg’s definition – meaning “cases that highlight more general characteristics of the societies in question” (2006: 232) – for the problems facing Western, liberal capitalist societies pursuing projects of transport decarbonisation. In particular, we argue, its struggles to find persuasive political visions for transport decarbonisation are indicative of two more general problems. Firstly, there is a tension in Swedish politics today between the traditional welfare state, associated with an active industrial policy, and the more recent appearance of neoliberalism, which makes Sweden a good example to study for insights into the state’s role in leading decarbonisation projects (Hildingsson, 2014). Secondly, the deep historical connection in Sweden between the growth of fossil fuel and car use, on the one hand, and economic growth, on the other, is representative of the general dilemma of decoupling, and whether decarbonisation projects are best framed by explicitly anti-capitalist or green growth visions.
Both sets of problems are thus related to a fundamental tension between ideas of historical continuity and discontinuity in the formulation of policies for deep decarbonisation, to which we return in our concluding discussion.
In the following, we set out our view of how ideas can be seen to drive discursive change, and how such ideas relate to material-structural and institutional change.
Theory and method – the role of ideas in discourse
Previous research on Swedish transport planning and decarbonisation paints a picture of systemic inertia, due to the intricate institutional, material and ideological path-dependencies around the petrol-driven car. While these path-dependencies became entrenched over time, their foundations can be traced to the years after WWII, when Sweden embarked on a massive project of modernisation through urban planning (cf. Falkemark, 2006).
Through post-positivist discourse theory, this can be investigated with a focus on how certain, “high-modernist” (Scott, 1999) ideas become “part of a contextually specific process of articulation and institutionalization” (Kjaer and Pedersen, 2001; also Haikola and Anshelm, 2022; Hajer, 1996). Discourse, in this view, amounts to a “specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorizations that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities” (Hajer, 1996: 44). Discourses work according to internal rules that limit the subject positions from which actors may speak, yet they are open to change through the formation of new political identities (Howarth, 2010). They are pervaded with power which runs through “sedimented social institutions” that, nevertheless, are unstable enough to always permit actors to “identify with new possibilities” (ibid., p.314). They are, as Hajer writes, both “enabling and constraining” (Hajer, 1996: 48).
In this definition of discourse, ideas, institutions and the physical world all interact to structure reality in particular ways. Here, we focus specifically on ideas and their role in the total “ensemble” of discursive structuring elements that Hajer speaks of. Ideas, we argue, are crucial both to making certain perspectives on the world entrenched in policy-making, and in facilitating institutional change (Hall, 1993; Schön, 1979). They do so both through active mobilisation by actors to promote a certain political program or policy, and by forming a “background” of tacit knowledge and assumptions about how the world works (Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016). Both forms of ideational influence are important for the process of building “discourse coalitions”, i.e. heterogenous groups of actors with disparate political interests that unite behind a particular political vision (Hajer, 1996).
For the discourse analyst, this sometimes explicit/active and sometimes implicit/passive aspect of ideas make it useful to think in terms of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach. Here, the work of analysing texts involves a continuous movement between explanation and understanding, between analysing the internal parts of the text and understanding the meanings that may be attributed to it (Ricoeur, 1976). Ricoeur’s description of moving between “understanding what it says to understanding what it talks about” (ibid, p.88) in this context means analysing both how actors explicitly draw upon a common repertoire of metaphors, narratives and categories that constitute a discourse, and how their statements should be understood as conditioned by their ideational background.
Using this approach, we have studied a vast material of texts published between 2008 and 2021 in Sweden’s four largest daily newspapers on the topic of transport system decarbonisation. The time period was set to enable the analysis of discursive changes in response to the global financial crisis of 2008, and the Covid crisis of 2020. We searched in particular for tensions within the discourse, and specifically for the emergence of ideas challenging the current planning system as inadequate to the task of decarbonisation. This analytical logic determines our presentation, based on approximately 110 news items chosen from the 800 that we originally identified as relevant. This smaller sample was chosen as representative of how transport decarbonisation discourse became increasingly politicised during the period studied. From this material, we were able to study how ideas lock in subject positions or facilitate discursive change, and the relation between ideas and the institutional and material contexts through which the ideas appear.
While we thus believe a worthwhile analytical distinction can be made between ideas, institutions and materiality (cf. Bacchi and Rönnblom, 2014), we do not seek to make a theoretical statement or contribution to the academic debate on the relative importance of ideas (e.g. Campbell, 1998). Indeed, we remain sceptical of the possibility to isolate ideas as an independent variable whose separate contribution to political or institutional change may be determined (cf. Kulawik, 2009; Schmidt, 2011). Formal institutions (e.g. rules, legislation, organisational procedures) are of course made up of ideas, just as material reality is always mediated through ideas, and human infrastructures are built on certain ideational assumptions. Yet neither are reducible to only ideas. In our investigation, we do not claim to be able to infer causal relationships (e.g. how material interests occasion the appearance of a specific idea), nor speak of intentions behind the promotion of certain ideas (cf. Parsons, 2016). We merely want to acknowledge the fact that ideational constructs about how the world works and should work have influence on how institutions and politics evolve, “as a result of people interpreting their world through certain ideational elements” (Parsons, 2007: 96).
Our primary interest lies in explaining the appearance of a historically unique discourse coalition in Swedish transport decarbonisation discourse. To do this, we argue, we need to acknowledge the importance of the ideational in facilitating and hindering policy developments on the field of transport decarbonisation. We show how the active mobilisation of a specific idea about the historical role of the state, as well as hegemonic, “background” ideas were important as actors attempted to create new policy space at the boundaries of the discourse where transport decarbonisation appeared to have reached an impasse (Gramsci, 1971; Lukes, 1974). In the following, we survey the literature on the evolution of the modern Swedish transport system and the role of ideas.
The importance of ideas in previous research on Swedish transport planning
Lundin’s (2008) and Anshelm’s (2002) historical investigations reveal how modern Swedish transport planning was formed by a new group of professional planners steeped in a deterministic myth of societal progress through technology. Their planning culture was thus inextricably linked to the growth optimism that dominated the then-hegemonic Social Democratic Party (Anshelm, 1995), and to the party’s decision to embrace the car as both a method for achieving economic growth, and a cultural symbol of this achievement (Falkemark, 2006; Lundin, 2008). Falkemark (2006) has traced the formation of path-dependencies further back in time, highlighting the influential production of ideas by car lobbying groups and the unwillingness of Parliament to regulate car transport, as preconditions for the explosive growth of car transport infrastructure after WWII.
Such path-dependencies were reinforced by a neoliberal approach to planning that emerged in later decades. Eriksson (2016), Hultén (2012) and Meijling (2020) illustrate how the decentralisation and deregulation of planning that followed 1990 fostered a “pragmatic” (Hultén, 2012) and fragmented approach to infrastructure development. With planning institutions being reformed to facilitate a new political climate featuring weaker central state control, ambitions to actively steer infrastructural development in line with political goals were diminished. Isaksson (2021) and Witzell (2020) further show how such reformed planning institutions struggle to adapt to the political imperatives to decarbonise the transport sector (see also Haikola and Anshelm, fc).
A common feature of this research is that it underlines the historically contingent nature of ideas, and their importance in shaping institutional practices and political ambitions. Ideas emerge in a specific historical context, but may become institutionalised and continue to influence political consciousness long after material conditions have changed (Liedman and Olausson, 1988). To alter the political and institutional landscape in such cases, new ideas must be formed to challenge the hegemony (Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016).
From this perspective, the birth of the modern Swedish transport system during the post-war decades can be understood as guided by a powerful idea of progress, and the lack of successful decarbonisation policies as the result of a failure to mobilise potent counter-ideas. The project of decarbonising transport must contend not only with the various path-dependencies that permeate any large technical system (Hughes, 2011; Kaijser, 1994), but also with the inertia of history, which carries particular weight for such deliberate attempts at fundamental societal change. Hence, it must distil from history a politically persuasive idea offering both continuity and radical discontinuity. In this paper, we describe the attempt to formulate such an idea, in what constitutes a clear shift in Swedish transport decarbonisation discourse over the past decade.
Analysis
The political landscape
During the 1990s, Sweden experienced a severe economic crisis that led to fundamental restructurings of the economy and the public sector. A new fiscal policy framework was established that limited the government’s ability to run a budget deficit. This was deemed necessary both due to the perception that the national debt was important in causing the crisis, and to bring Swedish economic management in line with Maastricht rules, even though Sweden opted out of the Euro following a national referendum in 1994.
In hindsight, the economic crisis of the early 1990s and the broad political consensus around how it was managed can be seen as a historical watershed. It put an end to the expansionary fiscal policy that the Social Democratic Party had pursued hitherto and reoriented the political centre rightward. While the left–right distinction has remained the primary distinguishing principle in Swedish politics, the parties on the left have accepted the legitimacy of the fiscal policy framework and the de-facto abandonment of full employment as a political goal.
While several important neoliberal-oriented reforms were made during the 1990s, by both conservative and social-democratic governments, they were imposed on a broader scale during the period of liberal–conservative “Alliance” rule between 2006 and 2014. The Alliance successfully adopted some popular social-democratic policies while simultaneously pursuing neoliberal deregulation and a strict budgetary discipline, with the result that Sweden emerged relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Nevertheless, when the Social Democratic Labour Party, SAP – severely weakened from the period before the 1990s crisis – assumed power in coalition with the Greens in 2014, there were some signs of popular disaffection with the era of neoliberalism. Subsequently, the political scene changed dramatically, with a new right-wing bloc, including the nationalist Swedish Democrats, responding to a perceived public desire for restrictive immigration policies by arguing for a “strong but limited” state (Fjellner, 2020: 6). The simultaneously emerging centre-left coalition included left-wing and green parties, along with the (neo)liberal Centre Party. Thus, the neoliberal Alliance was consigned to history, and a period of precarious social democrat–green government ensued, premised on the seemingly irreconcilable parliamentary support of neoliberals and an increasingly vocal left.
Repoliticisation tendencies in parliament
After the economic crisis of the early 1990s in Sweden, a broad parliamentary consensus was established around the merits of austerity. Well into the 2000s, transport decarbonisation discourse was thus characterised by the depoliticisation following from agreement across the political spectrum that market-induced technological change would be the main route to reducing emissions from transport (Anshelm and Hultman, 2015; Haikola and Anshelm, fc). At the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, there was widespread reluctance within Parliament to criticise the fiscal policy framework or to call for expansive infrastructural policies to counter the crisis.
However, towards the end of 2008, the SAP’s shadow Minister of Infrastructure signalled the beginning of a new offensive from the oppositional left in Parliament, when he argued that the liberal–conservative Alliance government had “passively allowed both the climate and the job crisis to deepen” 1 and should invest in high-speed rail (“Sluta utreda…”, 2008). Together with the blue-collar confederation LO, the SAP, the Left Party and the Greens argued that the economic downturn must be met with an expansionary fiscal policy and that investment in sustainable transport infrastructure was needed both to refuel the Swedish economy and to decarbonise transport. Transport decarbonisation was deemed a necessity that must happen anyway, and the economic crisis provided a window of opportunity for such investment, as dictated by the logic of counter-cyclical fiscal policy within the framework of mainstream economics (Eriksson, 2010a; Sahlin et al., 2008, 2010a; Smith and Andersson, 2008; Östros et al., 2009). The Greens launched the vision of a Green New Deal, to benefit both trade unions and industry (Eriksson, 2010b), which encompassed a fundamental reorientation of transport planning through massive improvements in public transport to facilitate a reduction in road transport (Eriksson and Olsen, 2008; Eriksson and Wetterstrand, 2010; Romson and Bergström, 2012; Ruwaida and Wallner, 2012).
Large-scale investment in transport infrastructure, especially rail, thus emerged as a key component of the opposition’s political platform before the election in 2010 (Sahlin et al., 2010b), forcing the Centre Party, which was then part of the liberal–conservative Alliance and held the Infrastructure Department, to favour more expansive investment policies (Olofsson et al., 2009). This meant no more, however, than that it would join the conservative Finance Minister in his critique of social-democratic profligacy that would increase the cost of Swedish government debt (Larsson, 2010), with the Infrastructure Minister dismissing social-democratic plans for high-speed rail as “unrealistic and unfinanced” (Torstensson, 2010). The power of such arguments is evident from the fact that the leaders of both the SAP and the Greens were careful to point out that their proposed investments would be financed by a new tax on heavy goods vehicles (Eriksson, 2010a).
The conservative–liberal Alliance, true to its claim to represent workers’ interests, did promise some transport investment, using counter-cyclical arguments (Reinfeldt et al., 2008, 2011). However, its main line was one of fiscal conservatism with little scope for radical decarbonisation policies, and this was rewarded with its election win in 2010. The SAP remained insistent that a new transport policy was needed to enable Sweden to invest itself out of the economic crisis, with its transport spokesperson terming the laissez-faire railway policies of the Alliance “an extreme political strategy” (“S-gruppledarna listar…”, 2010; Ygeman, 2010).
When the Social Democrats and Greens assumed government 4 years later, they promised to take the lead in reorienting transport planning and rebuilding the transport system for a sustainable future. The blue-collar confederation LO found the new government’s policies to be better aligned with what was needed, but not ambitious enough (Svensson and Holmqvist, 2015). During its first term in office, the government reiterated its desire to further increase investment in rail and other sustainable transport, to the betterment of Swedish industry and the labour market, while also abiding by the fiscal-policy framework (Fridolin and Lövin, 2017; Löfven et al., 2016). A further ramping up of decarbonisation ambitions occurred after the left–green political bloc won a close election in 2018, leading to a new government dependent on the support of both the liberal Centre Party and the Left Party in a precariously balanced Parliament (Petersson, 2021).
By then, the decarbonisation vision promoted by the Social Democratic Labour Party had been increasingly targeted by critics within or close to the party itself. Both the party’s own youth wing and LO had begun questioning the government’s ability or willingness to deliver on its decarbonisation promise (“SSU: S måste…”, 2019; Thorwaldsson et al., 2020). This was indicative of a repoliticising movement that had begun to emerge during the preceding few years among groups outside of parliamentary politics. It echoed and reinforced the arguments about expansionary fiscal policy through transport investment that had first been used by the green–left political opposition in Parliament a decade earlier, but with the addition of calls to abolish the fiscal policy framework. Such demands were given further impetus and legitimacy by the drastically changed circumstances of the Covid pandemic. Below, we first trace the appearance of this extra-parliamentary discourse, then identify what it perceived as the main obstacles to effective climate policies, and finally show how it played out in parliamentary politics.
The emergence of an eco-Keynesian discourse coalition
By 2007, state transport agencies were already expressing concern about what they perceived as political negligence in relation to transport infrastructure investment and greenhouse gas emissions from transport (Skogö et al., 2007). Transport and industry researchers joined in with critiques that politicians seemed unable to identify or break away from unsustainable path dependencies in the transport system (Berggren et al., 2008). Years later, in 2016 and 2020 respectively, two expert commissions similarly argued that decarbonising the transport system will necessitate far more significant investment than governments of any political colour had been willing to acknowledge (Eklund, 2020; Eklund et al., 2017; Eklund et al., 2020; Wessberg and Håkansson Boman, 2016; 2017).
After 2010, similar arguments were beginning to emerge from a group of actors who had, until then, remained silent or outright sceptical on the issue of transport decarbonisation: representatives of large businesses and industrial companies. Initially, this was mostly confined to companies with a direct interest in rail investment, such as the steelmaker SSAB, or industries with a connection to particular rail projects (Ahl et al., 2010; Bondemark and Axelsson, 2011; Westerberg and Engstrand, 2017), but the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and the transport council of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprises also pressed for greater state investment in public transport infrastructure to bring transport policy into line with climate objectives (Ehrling and Nygren, 2012a, 2012b). Over the coming decade, more and more business and industry representatives challenged the government as lacking in climate leadership (Ahl et al., 2010; Bondemark and Axelsson, 2011; “Klimatförhandlingarna kräver…”, 2018; Westerberg and Engstrand, 2017) and stressed the importance of state action to restructure Swedish industry (“Det finns stora…”, 2019). The CEOs of Volvo and Scania called jointly for political efforts to make Sweden the “first fossil-free welfare state” through massive investment in rail and electrified road transport (Henriksson and Lundstedt, 2019), while the latter argued that the climate emergency demands a political will to actively steer industry and the launching of “something akin to a Marshall Plan” (Stiernstedt, 2019).
After the Covid pandemic had further upset faith in the free market by necessitating unprecedented state regulation of different sectors of society, such calls only intensified. The CEO of Northvolt identified “effective reforms” to deliver a green industrial policy and economic recovery from Covid as being dependent on “Swedish politics having sufficient force and scale” (Carlsson, 2020). Companies as diverse as Ericsson, H&M, Scania, EON and more, demanded massive investment in the electrification of both road transport and rail in order for Sweden to gain a competitive advantage and contribute to the climate transition, an imperative that was expressed in ominous terms (Ekholm et al., 2020; see also Brodin and Figueres, 2020; Carlsson, 2020; “Planera nu…”, 2020). The CEOs of state-owned mining company LKAB, state-owned energy company Vattenfall and private steelmaker SSAB argued that it would be “fatal” to miss the opportunity afforded by the pandemic to fundamentally restructure the economy to facilitate decarbonisation and Swedish export triumphs, calling for investment in “green transport”, among other things (Moström et al., 2020). Representatives of most Chambers of Commerce similarly argued that the pandemic had revealed the necessity of state investment in “the infrastructure of the future”, namely high-speed rail (Müchlem et al., 2020).
In striking contrast to the period before 2010, Swedish business and industry thus demanded that the state return to a stage it had vacated. They were far from alone. After 2015, editorials in large liberal newspapers began calling for large-scale state investment in electric highways and rail (Nilsson, 2020a, 2020b; Westholm, 2018; Wolodarski 2020a). Again, the issue was presented as an absolute necessity, both for dealing with the climate crisis and for Swedish industry’s chances of survival. Like the representatives of business and industry, these liberal commentators argued that the pandemic should be used as an opportunity to enforce fundamental societal change. The editor in chief of the largest Swedish daily newspaper, for example, wrote that the Covid emergency offered “a unique chance to found a more sustainable and climate-friendly transport system that will benefit Sweden in the long term” (Wolodarski, 2020b). His exhortations to politicians to act instead of hesitating (Wolodarski, 2020a) were echoed by his colleague in the business press, who called for politicians to “invest now” (Nilsson, 2020a).
The newfound belief in state–industry cooperation and the merits of industrial policy extended even further. The former chief of Sweden’s largest environmental NGO, the Society For Nature Conservation, now head of the organisation Fossil Free Sweden, joined forces with internationally renowned climate expert Johan Rockström, and the CEOs of Volvo and Scania, to call for the remaking of Sweden into a “permanent exhibition for fossil-free transport solutions, contributing to the export of new technology” (Axelsson et al., 2018a). A new political group within the Social Democratic Party, called the Reformists, styling itself “climate Keynesian”, demanded a reorientation of politics away from the individual towards structural issues, from “individual shaming” to investment in transport infrastructure and the “creation of a transition industry” (Kallifatides and Suhonen, 2019; Suhonen and Sundin, 2020). Unsurprisingly, similar words could be heard from the head of the blue-collar federation LO, who urged politicians to become “braver” and ramp up infrastructural investment (Delling et al., 2015; Thorwaldsson et al., 2020). What is more striking is that several neoclassical economists, from the Stockholm School of Economics and Swedbank, took the Covid pandemic as an indication that the time had come to fundamentally change economic policy to facilitate decarbonisation. According to these economists, the pandemic had demonstrated that there is ample scope for the state to significantly expand its financial efforts to restructure industry for a climate transition, something they argued to be necessary both for the climate and for the national economy (Ackum et al., 2020a; Eklund, 2020; Hjalmarsson and Vahlne, 2020; Nilsson, 2020c; Wallström et al., 2020).
Thus, for this historically new and unique discourse coalition, the binding vision was premised not only on the necessity of decarbonising transport through active industrial policy, but also on the tacit assumption that this must happen through economic growth and an ever-increasing demand for transport (e.g. Axelsson et al., 2018a, 2018b; Axelsson and Engström, 2019; Ehrling and Nygren, 2012a; 2012b; Ekholm et al., 2020; Henriksson and Lundstedt, 2019; Jammeh et al., 2018). There was little discernible difference between the arguments of the climate Keynesians in the reform wing of the Social Democratic Labour Party and the CEOs of large companies, or between trade unions and business newspaper editors claiming that “climate transition will be the most important engine for economic growth” (Axelsson et al., 2018a, 2018b; Eklund, 2020; “Det finns stora…”, 2019; Kallifatides et al., 2021; Kallifatides and Suhonen, 2019; Nilsson, 2016a, 2020a, 2020b; Suhonen and Sundin 2020; Thorwaldsson et al., 2020; Wolodarski, 2020a). The actors within this discourse coalition also shared the belief that certain institutions governing Swedish transport planning must be reformed in order for decarbonisation to be possible.
Calls to reform transport institutions
The transport administration as institutional obstacle
The emerging discourse coalition was united by the notion that institutional path dependencies created difficulties for the Transport Administration to adapt to the requirements of decarbonisation. Interestingly, this critique can be traced to the years before the agency was formed, with the argument that a new organisational structure was needed for transport planning to be able to incorporate climate targets (Billinger et al., 2009).
Back in 2008, the leader of the Green Party was arguing that transport policy was based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about future transport patterns (Eriksson and Olsen, 2008). Around the same time, the directors of the Road Administration and the Railroad Administration (which would be combined into the Transport Administration in 2010) signed an opinion piece to the effect that state agencies had neglected to invest in new transport infrastructure for three decades because they were using socio-economic calculations that rendered the need for fundamental systems change invisible (Skogö et al., 2007). The director of the Board for Industrial and Technical Development made similar claims, arguing that the models being used failed to adequately reveal the superiority of rail investment over road investment from a climate perspective (Halvarsson and Englén, 2008).
A perspective that had thus clearly been present when the Transport Administration was formed, gained increasing prominence over the coming decade in a critique of the agency itself. Former SAP Prime Minister Göran Persson was one of many who blamed the institutionalised use of cost–benefit analysis for the lack of progress in transport decarbonisation. He highlighted the success of the Denmark–Sweden bridge, which cost–benefit analyses had evaluated as being uneconomic, as evidence of the conservatism inherent in socio-economic calculations used to inform planning (Kielos, 2014; Persson et al., 2010). What was the point of politics, he asked rhetorically, if not precisely to think beyond the rigid framework of such models? In 2014, the Transport Workers’ Union and the Society for Nature Conservation argued that the Transport Administration was using models and prognoses seemingly detached from the political vision of a decarbonised transport system (Axelsson and Lindgren, 2014), something that was also claimed some years later by the liberal thinktank Fores (Borgström and Davidsson, 2019). After 2014, representatives of the social democratic–green government similarly criticised the Transport Administration’s way of valuing climate investments (“Dyra höghastighetståg…”, 2016; Smith, 2016). They were joined by representatives of business and industry, as well as the business press, who claimed that investment decisions affecting the very basis of Sweden’s economy must be evaluated by other standards than those offered by narrow socio-economic models (Ehrling and Nygren, 2012a; Nilsson, 2016b; 2020b; Jammeh et al., 2018).
Towards the end of the 2010s, such sentiments were also expressed by economists, as well as sustainability and transport researchers, who stated that the models used by the Transport Administration were weighted in favour of cars and thus made any modal shift impossible (Larsson, 2020; Petersson, 2019, 2020a, 2020b; Roth, 2019). According to Nils Brunsson, professor of business administration, the very idea that societal change could be evaluated and expressed in a single number was ludicrous, since the question of how the transport system should look in the future was fundamentally political. By reducing it to a matter of economic calculus, argued Brunsson, transport planners were acting akin to “populists”, who reduce matters of complex reflection to simple slogans (Petersson, 2020c).
The Transport Administration itself, meanwhile, had begun to acknowledge the contradiction in its mandate to plan for both accessibility and sustainability, but argued that it could do little to further the latter because its mandate extended only to building and maintaining physical infrastructure (e.g. STA, 2017). This line of argument was, in turn, critiqued by transport researchers, who claimed that the administration had failed to acknowledge its responsibility (Petersson, 2020a, 2020b).
The need to reform environmental permit processes
Another institutional obstacle identified by a wide array of actors was environmental legislation, which was perceived to stand in the way of industry projects that they argued were necessary for decarbonisation. This was a common refrain from both business and industry, and their claims about the slow granting of permits increased in intensity during the Covid pandemic. The CEOs of EON, Vattenfall, SSAB, LKAB, Volvo and Scania, for example, all claimed that authorisation procedures that could take 10 years to conclude made Swedish climate targets for 2030 impossible to realise (Henriksson and Lundstedt, 2019; Moström et al., 2020; Viklund and Mörnstam, 2020).
This time around, a broad range of other actors joined in. Both the LO and the Reformists of the SAP argued that faster procedures for environmental permits were a prerequisite for decarbonisation, with the latter specifically identifying wind power, power-grid extensions and the extraction of “transition metals” as projects that must be treated with expediency and reliability (Suhonen and Sundin, 2020; Thorwaldsson et al., 2020). They were joined by various experts from different scientific disciplines who had been appointed to the Swedish Climate Policy Council and the so-called Commission for an Economic Restart (Ackum et al., 2020b; Eklund, 2020; Rosén and Alestig, 2021; cf. Rockström, 2016).
Thus, once Swedish business and industry geared up for the fight against climate change, they found support from a broad base of actor groups ready to grant legitimacy to their claims about required institutional changes. The central struggle in the new discursive landscape, however, arguably concerned the cornerstone of Swedish economic policy in the 21st century: the fiscal policy framework.
Reforming or abandoning the fiscal policy framework
It is notable that around the time of the 2008 global economic crisis, two of the figures most intimately associated with the establishment of the austere fiscal policy framework of the 1990s had already begun to question its continued relevance. At the onset of the financial crisis, Assar Lindbeck, the prominent economist who had led the commission that suggested structural changes to Swedish economic policy in the 1990s, argued that the objective of achieving public budget surpluses should be abandoned. What was needed, in the face of a coming economic downturn and vast infrastructural investment needs, was not further “hoarding of money” but an active state investment policy, which was made possible precisely because of the success of the austerity policies he had launched (Lindbeck, 2008). Similarly, the social democrat–green political opposition argued that the budgetary surplus target did not have value in itself. However, they argued, the liberal–conservative government failed to use the leverage that Sweden’s strong public finances provided during the crisis (Sahlin et al., 2008). After the crisis, former Prime Minister Göran Persson, who had been the SAP Finance Minister when the new fiscal rules were established, argued, like Lindbeck, that the success of 1990s austerity had created space for an expansionary fiscal policy now. Sweden could afford reforms, he argued, and they were much needed to drive the new, grand political project of decarbonisation (Kielos, 2014).
Towards the end of the 2010s, pressure increased on the government to reform or wholly abandon the fiscal policy framework. Again, the Covid pandemic contributed significantly to this. Groups and organisations within or closely related to the SAP criticised what they perceived as penny-pinching while the house was burning down, and the infrastructure crumbling. The two largest trade union confederations echoed Lindbeck’s and Persson’s arguments when they asked, rhetorically, what the 1990s austerity had been for if it was never followed by expansionary fiscal policy (Karlsson and Jeppson, 2018; Röstlund, 2015). The Social Democratic think-tank Katalys and the party’s Keynesian reform wing called for the abolition of the budgetary surplus target and massive state borrowing for climate investment over a prolonged time period. “The infrastructure was collapsing”, claimed the Reformists, “and the government was paralysed” by arbitrary fiscal rules. The group therefore argued for the creation of a specific investment budget financed by debt, which would be devoted to the twin political goals of full employment and decarbonisation (Kallifatides and Suhonen, 2019; Kallifatides et al., 2019, 2021; Suhonen et al., 2013; Suhonen and Sundin, 2020; cf. Wijkman and Skånberg, 2016).
After 2015, critiques of how fiscal rules were applied were also emerging from actors representing business and financial interests. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and Sweden’s four largest banks argued that the budgetary surplus target had become an obstacle to what Swedbank’s economists called the “green, expansionary fiscal policy” necessary to achieve infrastructural decarbonisation (Broman and Wallström, 2019; Röstlund, 2015). The CEO of Nasdaq Stockholm similarly called for the government to use the opportunity provided by the pandemic to make sustainable infrastructure investments financed by debt (Westergård, 2020). Arguments to the same effect were frequently raised on the editorial pages of Sweden’s largest business newspaper, which cautioned against allowing the fiscal policy framework to stand in the way of much-needed investments in, for example, high-speed rail (Nilsson, 2018, 2020a, 2020b). The Climate Policy Council also emphasised the need to connect the government budget in general, and the pandemic recovery effort specifically, to climate targets, and argued that the fiscal policy framework currently hindered effective climate policies (Fritzon, 2018; Westerberg and Engstrand, 2017).
During the 2010s, there thus emerged huge opposition to the way in which fiscal rules were being applied. In Parliament, this put pressure on the SAP, who by tradition supported the fiscal policy framework, and were further pressed to do so by opposition parties on the right.
Eco-Keynesianism debated in parliament
As we saw previously, the SAP was leading the left–green opposition to the liberal–conservative Alliance during the global financial crisis of 2008. Thus, the party contributed to the repoliticisation of transport discourse during the 2010s, frequently calling for greater state responsibility for decarbonisation. To a significant extent, the emerging eco-Keynesian discourse coalition shared the vision of a “green welfare state” that the Social Democrats had launched under Göran Persson in the mid-90s, and which had guided their climate programmes in the 2010s (Anshelm and Hultman, 2015; Persson et al., 2010; Kielos, 2014).
In regard to the more progressive calls from the left, and from actors calling for the reform or abolition of the fiscal policy framework, however, its position was ambiguous. When the parties of the liberal–conservative Alliance lost power in 2014, they soon began to voice criticism of the new left–green government for its perceived failure to respect the fiscal rules. “Economic protective walls” that the Alliance had built were now being eroded by socialist profligacy, they claimed, and most of the opposition rejected the new government’s proposal to moderately revise the budgetary surplus target (Kindberg Batra et al., 2014; Röstlund, 2015). Their claims were supported by a broad base of conservative economists, who warned that the fiscal emergency measures taken during the pandemic must be reversed once economic recovery began, with the fiscal policy framework being strictly applied again (“Coronabudgeten…”, 2020). They specifically warned against the dangers of financing transport infrastructure with government debt, arguing that it would burden future generations (Börjesson et al., 2019; Kågeson, 2021).
Thus pressured by conservative accusations of economic laxity from one direction, the Social Democrats were simultaneously pressured by the parties in their own political bloc, which after 2014 included the liberal Centre Party. The Left, the Greens and the Centre Party all demanded large-scale state investment in transport infrastructure financed by state loans, to which Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén and Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson repeatedly answered that their government would abide by the fiscal policy framework and therefore refused funding by government debt (Jammeh et al., 2018; Karlsson, 2017; Lööf et al., 2017; Rosén, 2015; Skog et al., 2017; Sjöstedt and Andersson, 2019; Öjemar, 2020). When Covid struck, both the Greens and the Left Party argued that pandemic recovery programs should be used to raise the stakes in the climate transition, to fight unemployment and global warming at the same time. The Left Party in particular argued that Covid had opened a “window” for a new kind of politics, based on massive state spending to enforce structural change (Andersson, 2020; “Coronabudgeten…”, 2020; Dadgostar and Andersson, 2020; “Gröna projekt…”, 2020; Lindberg, 2020). In response, Finance Minister Andersson reiterated her commitment to fiscal discipline and her principle of “saving for a rainy day”. Loan financing, she argued, was an illusory way of creating further fiscal space, as the money would have to be paid back eventually (Andersson, 2017; Augustsson, 2017; Karlsson, 2017). She did, however, suggest the possibility of a modest revision of the budgetary surplus target to fund more investment, but regretted that she lacked parliamentary support for such a measure (Öjemar, 2020).
Discussion
In this paper, we have identified a marked shift in the Swedish political discourse on transport. This shift amounts to a repoliticisation of a previously depoliticised discourse (Hay, 2014; Jessop, 2014), as a hegemonic, neoliberal narrative was challenged by the emerging – or re-emerging – idea of the state. This testifies, we argue, to the power of ideas in the formation of political discourse, or, to be more precise, to the mutually reinforcing relations of power that exist between ideas, material interests and institutions when discourses and made and remade (Cox, 1983). In the following, we will describe the main discursive movements that we set out above, before explaining these in terms of the mobilisation of political ideas, before concluding with some reflections on the tension between historical continuity and discontinuity in relation to decarbonisation projects.
Neoliberal hegemony and repoliticisation
The repoliticisation that occurred during the period under investigation can be understood as a response to a prolonged period of neoliberal hegemony, during which the autonomy of the state and its power to influence socio-technical change and economic dynamics was perceived as severely restricted (Anshelm and Hultman, 2015; Haikola and Anshelm, fc). The rediscovery of the idea of the state caused significant shifts in the subject positions within the discourse, and tension between the emerging discourse coalition, which we will call the “eco-Keynesian” coalition, and ideas inherited from the past.
The central discursive struggle in our investigation can be understood in terms of Chalmers Johnson’s distinction between the regulatory state and the developmental state: A regulatory, or market rational, state concerns itself with the form and procedures – the rules, if you will – of economic competition, but it doesn’t concern itself with substantive matters […] The developmental state, or plan-rational state, by contrast, has as its dominant feature precisely the setting of such substantive social and economic goals. (Johnson, 1982)
The neoliberal governance that dominated Swedish transport planning well into the 2010s was about creating the conditions for market-induced decarbonisation, most importantly by strict adherence to the fiscal policy framework. The left–green political opposition to the liberal–conservative Alliance identified this at the central flaw in the latter’s transport policies and argued that decarbonisation needs be positioned as a higher-end political goal to which all other policies must be directed. The emergence of the eco-Keynesian discourse coalition reinforced the central conflict between the two ideas of the state, because it posits that the goal of decarbonisation must be the focal point of economic policy, rather than the former having to be adjusted to fit the latter.
For the actor groups within the new discourse coalition, embracing the idea of the “developmental decarbonisation” state requires a shift in their subject positions. The belated embrace of fundamental decarbonisation by powerful industrial and business groups marks a radical break with a history of conservative business caution and sometimes outright climate scepticism (Anshelm and Hultman, 2015; see also Ottosson, 2011). At the same time, it requires that green actors, including the Green Party, abandon their references to degrowth-related ideas, just as the left must renounce its critique of capitalism.
But the reorientation towards a new concept of the state is ambiguous. While all actors within the eco-Keynesian discourse coalition argue that the fiscal policy framework should not be an end in itself, there are indications of a fundamental disagreement about the principal legitimacy of its very existence. For the more moderate reformers, the fiscal policy framework has served, and still serves, the important function of reining in the democratic state’s tendency towards fiscal excess. For more radical actors, the very fact that the framework is thus revealed as political rather than based on any sort of objective, economic law is evidence that it should be abandoned. The Covid pandemic illuminated this disagreement, as some actors have interpreted the “fiscal space” available for emergency spending as proof of the importance of previous state saving, whereas others argue that the pandemic has lifted the veil to reveal hitherto unknown powers of the autonomous state. 2
The Social Democrats are caught somewhere in between: willing to embrace the idea of a more active state, yet also committed to the legitimacy of economic rules they were central to establishing in the first place. The leading role that actors connected to the Social Democratic Labour Party played in the management of the 1990s crisis has cemented a view of Third Way Social Democracy (Mudge, 2018), in which the austerity imposed by Social Democratic Parties across western Europe during the 1990s was part of the successful adaptation of socialism to changing external circumstances. For present-day Social Democrats, therefore, reminders of a glorious, socialist past fit rather uneasily into the idea of the early 1990s as a historical watershed, after which fiscal discipline has been the prerequisite for retaining some vestiges of the former welfare state (Altermark and Plesner, 2021). Breaking with this idea ultimately entails identifying the far-reaching retreat of the Swedish state after the 1990 crisis as a historical contingency, rather than a necessity. It requires challenging the deterministic consensus, promoted by both neoliberal ideology (Fukuyama, 1992) and Marxist historians (Hobsbawm, 1994), that the “Golden Age” of state-led capitalism from the 1950s to the early 1970s was a historical exception that may never be repeated.
This predicament of the SAP, as Sweden’s largest party and thus central to both any political opposition and government, is indicative of the extent to which the legacy of the 1990s determines subject positions in the discourse. We turn to this discursive power of sedimented ideas, as well as their emerging counter-ideas, below.
Ideas that move and restrict
Our investigation of the Swedish political discourse on transport reveals three crucial instances of ideational power in discourse. Firstly, the idea of the fiscally constrained state determines subject positions within the discourse throughout the period studied. Secondly, the depoliticised, neoliberal idea of limited state involvement dominated transport planning discourse through the 1990s and into the 2010s. They are intimately connected but should still be treated as analytically separate, because there is an important difference between adhering to the merit of “sound” public finances and actively pursuing neoliberal political projects. Both are instances of what Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) call the “power in ideas”: “the deeper-level ideational and institutional structures that actors draw upon and relate their ideas to in order for them to gain recognition among elites and in the mass public” (p.329). In other words, they are ideas that gain discursive hegemony, by becoming “so accepted that their very existence may be forgotten, even as they may come to structure people’s thoughts about the economy, polity and society” (ibid.).
Thirdly, when a (re-)emerging idea of the state challenges the neoliberal hegemony in order to reconstitute discourse and discourse coalitions, it can be seen as an instance of what Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) call “the power through ideas”, which to them is the active mobilisation of ideas for the purpose of highlighting limitations to a policy paradigm. Such an active ideational mobilisation serves to contest “existing institutions and to build legitimacy around a competing set of ideas” that identify societal developments “as policy anomalies that undermine the authority of the paradigm” (p.325).
Here, ideas can be seen as key elements of discourses in their own right, rather than merely an ideological expression of underlying material or institutional conditions. At the same time, as Jacobs (2015) states, it is only through their interaction with such institutional and material conditions that ideas gain their power to move and restrict discourse.
More specifically, what we are seeing is how historical events are rendered intelligible to actors through ideas of good governance, which are then used to forge coalitions of influential actors to form hegemonic and counter-hegemonic blocs (Parsons, 2016). The neoliberal hegemony in Sweden is premised partly on post-Cold-War triumphalism, but even more on the experiences of the 1990s economic crisis (Erixon, 2011; Sverenius, 1999). The ideas of good governance that emerged from the crisis still unite large segments of the Swedish economics profession, transport planning agencies and, perhaps most importantly, Finance Department officials, regardless of political affiliation. As we saw, these ideas are premised on a specific reading of history, according to which the post-war welfare society, where the state worked actively together with industry and trade unions, has been forever relegated to history by exogenous forces. Because of their deep entrenchment within political consciousness and institutions, these ideas cause misalignment between certain political projects and political identities (Campbell, 1998; Hall, 1993). Such misalignment is most evident in the Social Democrats, who, throughout the period studied, attempted to combine Keynesian policies with adherence to the fiscal policy framework. Furthermore, the normalisation of high levels of unemployment, another legacy of the 1990s crisis, can explain the relative absence of calls for state action to counter the global financial crisis of 2008.
When the neoliberal hegemony is challenged, this occurs through the mobilisation of a counter-idea, which posits the rival idea that history can and indeed must repeat itself. According to this idea, it is rather the neoliberal period that constitutes a historical parenthesis, one that has been revealed as wholly inadequate to the task of decarbonising society. We can see the emergence of eco-Keynesian ideas within Swedish transport discourse as the result of influential actors becoming discursively marginalised. While fiscal conservatism may have served certain business interests to a degree – for example, by maintaining downward pressure on wages – it has also led to underinvestment in transport infrastructures that are crucial for Swedish industry (Erixon, 2011; Eriksson, 2016). Once industry identifies decarbonisation as a business possibility and/or necessity, its material interests become increasingly detached from ideas of fiscal conservatism and state retreat. The idea of industrial policy of the kind used by the state during the post-war decades then becomes a mobilising factor that allows disparate actors to unite in a common political project. For left-wing and green progressives, the same idea offers scope for the promotion of their political projects and an opportunity to largely side-step issues that may be deemed politically sensitive, such as raising taxes or reducing private consumption.
At the same time, the onset of the Covid pandemic illustrates how external forces impact upon discourse. This serves as a crucial, legitimising factor for the idea of a strong state, while also revealing the extent to which the idea of fiscal conservatism still forms an important condition of possibility for the discourse.
Therefore, ideas both move and restrict subject positions within the discourse. The folding of historical experience into the present through political visions is evidence not only of a generic politico-discursive pattern, what Andreas Malm terms “analogism” (2021), but also underlines a particular tension between historical continuity and discontinuity within discourses of decarbonisation. In the following, concluding section, we reflect further upon this tension.
Conclusion – historical continuity and discontinuity
For countries like Sweden, post-war welfare development and climate change poses a fateful question of historical determinism: to what extent may welfare enhancement be decoupled from fossil fuel use? Any political program for decarbonisation must contend with the challenge that emerges from the fossil fuel-driven history of technological development, which is to create a plausible vision that both radically breaks with the past and offers continuity in terms of societal progress. Transport decarbonisation in Sweden is a perfect example of a “wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber, 1973) suspended on this challenge, as the Swedish transport system is intricately bound up with a material, institutional and cultural heritage that constitutes the petrol car as a both literal and symbolic driver of modernity (Anshelm, 2002; Lundin, 2008).
Because of the deep embeddedness of the petrol car within the cultural and material fabric of the Swedish welfare state, the Swedish case may yield insights into the problems of deep decarbonisation elsewhere. In its general pattern, the discursive struggle we have identified between two opposing decarbonisation visions – with a period of neoliberal hegemony being increasingly challenged by a “return of the state” – is part of broader political movement in developed countries (Bäckstrand and Kronsell, 2015). After decades of market-oriented solutions to climate problems (e.g. Green, 2014), neoliberalism has been challenged both through “populist” movements and increasing calls for massive state investment into climate action programs, to the extent that a column in the Financial Times could declare in 2022 that “we’ve left the age of neoliberalism behind” (Foroohar, 2022). Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drastically changed the opportunity space for government regulation of the energy market, the twin economic crises of 2008 and 2020 had undermined the faith in market forces (Tooze, 2018, 2021).
Thus, the eco-Keynesian coalition in the Swedish transport decarbonisation discourse fits into a wider pattern of “Green New Deal” narratives emerging both within the EU and the US. They share a crucial feature in that they accentuate, rather than challenge, the technological determinism inherent to the neoliberal discourse. The central thrust of the repoliticisation that we identified in the Swedish transport decarbonisation discourse after 2010 is the critique that neoliberalism is flawed in its lack of commitment to green growth, not the notion of green growth itself. In what might seem like a historical curiosity, the eco-Keynesian discourse coalition bears a close resemblance to the coalition that built the modern Swedish road network, in both its constitution and firm belief in societal and technological progress through economic growth. It is testament to the way in which discursive ideas both unite actors and limit the subject positions available to critics of the hegemony. The eco-Keynesian discourse coalition is premised on a wager that a return to a form of state planning and industrial policy that prevailed during the “record years” of Swedish welfare development up to the oil crises of the 1970s holds the key to a decarbonised future. It is thus a refutation not only of laissez-faire market liberalism but also of the idea that the climate emergency demands a revolutionary politics (e.g. Malm, 2021).
Climate politics in Sweden and the Western world in general appear to be at a critical historical juncture. Neoliberal hegemony is eroded by multiple forces that push for a greater role for the state in energy provision and decarbonisation. However, in what economic historian Adam Tooze calls today’s “polycrisis” of climate warming, inflation, war, deglobalisation and post-pandemic supply chain issues (2022), it is far from clear what kind of climate politics will emerge. In its basic premise, the discursive struggle will follow the fault lines that was identified in the present paper: fiscal austerity will be juxtaposed to fiscal expansion, and industrial policy versus deregulation. It will be constrained by the material and institutional legacy inherited from the previous decades of neoliberal hegemony. The following decade therefore promises to reveal the extent to which years of dismantling of state capacity is reversible.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
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