Rising Seas and Rising Tensions – Exploring the Failure to Implement Flooding Regulations in a Swedish Municipality

Abstract: Rising sea levels and continuous coastal development increase vulnerability to flooding in southern Sweden. National regulations try to increase local consideration of flooding in urban planning, but so far implementation is limited. The aim of this thesis is to understand the lack of implementation and explore how and why implementation failed in a Swedish municipality. In order to study the case previous literature on barriers to implementation have been synthesised into a framework that structured the data collection process and the analysis. To gather data on how implementation failed, planning documents was analysed and to explain why implementation failed actors involved in the planning process, mainly department officials and local politicians, were interviewed to obtain data on what barriers prevent implementation. The result identifies that implementation failed because local politicians failed to act upon the risk of flooding. Two main aspects where identified that explain the behaviour of the local politicians. An interdependency with local land owners, that where critical of the regulation, and tensions with the County Administrative Board. The main contribution of this thesis is to understand the implementation failure as a product of the interorganisational context.