Local Governance on Environmental Sustainability : An in-depth case study of the impact of local governance on household consumption

Abstract: In Sweden, the municipalities are responsible for a good living environment, and today most municipalities work actively with climate change mitigation intending to decrease their emissions of greenhouse gases. Municipalities must decrease consumption-related emissions to achieve this. Further, this is a relatively new area that has gained focus within local governance, which asks the question, how are municipalities working to govern resident’s consumption behavior? This thesis investigate how a Swedish municipality works to steer their household consumption to become more sustainable and the experienced challenges. Bulkely & Kern (2006) three different mode of local governance: governing by authority, governing by provision, and governing through enabling will be employed to analyze how local government steer household consumption.  This thesis was carried out as a qualitative, in-depth case study, analyzing the experiences of civil servants operating in a Swedish municipality through semi-structured interviews and analyzing policy documents. Research findings show that measures to steer household consumption were performed mainly by deploying enabling governance by the municipality through information-based measures to promote sustainable consumption. The main obstacles identified are municipalities' lack of agency over household consumption behavior and the inherent complexity of environmental sustainability issues and lack of resources.