Soft Governance & the Implementation of Policy Instruments A Study on Municipal Crisis Preparedness in Sweden

Abstract: This qualitative study explores how crisis preparedness practitioners in Sweden perceive theAgreement on Municipalities' Crisis Preparedness and how the municipalities haveimplemented what is stated in the Agreement on Municipalities' Crisis Preparedness. Drawingon theories about soft governance and policy instruments this has allowed the study to explorehow the agreement might be viewed by those working with it in relation what the theories hasto say. This has been done through performing semi-structured interviews with seven crisispreparedness practitioners at seven different municipalities spread across Sweden. For thisstudy a thematic analysis was performed on the material, based on the interview guide and theindicators, Perception, and Implementation. The result of this study is that agreement is constructed in a way to give freedom to thoseworking with crisis preparedness and is seen as soft by practitioners, which means that theagreement as such can largely be seen as soft governance. However, some practitionersexpressed the notion that they would have liked to see clearer and stricter governmentalsteering. That it could be viewed as soft means that the agreement could potentially takeadvantage of the benefits to using a soft approach, or this would be the case if the studywasn’t able to show that there exist, a problem with crisis preparedness. This problem is thatthere is not enough money to do more than is necessary regarding crisis preparedness. Whythis is could be questioned as the municipalities have taxation rights and it could as such beinteresting to delve deeper into why this is in a future study.