WGA 2020 | Sweden | Policies Developed

Policies Developed

Question:
Discuss both explicitly formulated WGA policies and more implicit references to a WGA in your country. You may, for example, describe and assess the scope and quality of official or semi-official policies or discuss the country’s obligations under international and EU agreements.

Sweden Expert

Lars Niklasson

Senior Researcher, The Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS), Stockholm

Lars Niklasson is a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS) as well as Deputy Professor of Political Science at Linkoeping University. Before joining SIEPS and Linkoeping University, Lars was a Policy Analyst for several Swedish ministries, agencies and consultancies. He is also a National Expert for the OECD. His research focuses on the global role of the European Union, including its relations to Africa and its role in the global implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He teaches International Political Economy and Comparative Politics with a focus on global challenges and governance. Lars earned a PhD at Uppsala University in 1992, and has been a Visiting Researcher at a number of European and American universities, as well as at the University of Nairobi. His latest book is Improving the Sustainable Development Goals: Strategies and the Governance Challenge (Routledge 2019).

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The 2003 policy on global development was an early example of WGA and very similar to the EU principle of policy cohesion in development policy. The government bill describes the global situation, states a set of general aims for Swedish policies related to global development, and outlines 11 policy areas to be involved. However, the most specific part of the text is an outline of the Swedish policy for international development cooperation (aid), i.e. one specific policy area.

The government bill and the stated ambitions in the various areas are in themselves instruments for coordination, especially the statement that the policies must be consistent with each other. In addition, the bill proposes a ‘coordination function’ in the Government Offices, as the cabinet office is called, and additional work to establish an ‘evaluation function’ for this policy. The bill proposes continued support for international work to develop an index of cohesion, and argues that conflicts of interest across policy areas should be explicitly stated and acted upon. However, it fails to mention where this should be stated and by whom. In fact, there is no evidence of such a discussion in the official documents, and the bill merely states that the administrative instruments are to be further developed.

The 2007 strategy (Regeringens skrivelse 2007a) was introduced in a report to parliament, which is technically a piece of information on something already enacted by the cabinet, rather than as a proposal for a future policy to be decided on by parliament. After restating the general goals of the 2003 policy, it provides further elaboration on the specific area of international military-civilian operations by spelling out what the relevant military and civilian capabilities are. The strategy also discusses international and national coordination, with the latter being an encouragement (i.e. mandate) for the relevant agencies to improve coordination among themselves.

The agency set up in 2002 to support international civilian peacebuilding missions is interesting as an instrument for coordinating fieldwork. Its mandate is to contribute directly to the goals of the (narrow) policy of international development cooperation (aid) and indirectly to the broader cross-cutting goals.

However, as discussed earlier, these policies need to be seen in relation to existing barriers to and other mechanisms for cooperation in the Swedish context. A more general mechanism for policy coherence is the consensus decision-making in the cabinet office. As discussed earlier, the constitutional principle of consensus decision-making is carried out through mandatory consultations across the ministries (gemensam beredning). Since all proposals must be agreed by all other ministries beforehand, each ministry effectively has a right of veto. A typical example is when ministries protect ‘their’ agencies from participating in joint initiatives. The outcome is coherence by the least common denominator. In practice, though, the Ministry of Finance has a stronger position due to its power over the budget, and the Prime Minister’s Office also enjoys a stronger position, especially over the legislative agenda.

Furthermore, the consensus-based model also means that all formal instructions to agencies are given by the cabinet as a whole rather than by individual members of the government. As a result, individual ministers are generally not held accountable for what happens in ‘their’ agencies. In other words, the agencies have (on paper) a high level of independence from the cabinet office. In reality, informal instructions are accepted, which creates the odd situation that the formal instructions are agreed by all ministries, while the informal instructions are only given by the closest ministry.

It should also be noted that a large number of strategies are issued by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, mainly to guide the implementation of programmes by the international development-cooperation agency (SIDA), which results in a very complex structure of instructions (Statskontoret 2011). Hence, there are several other strategies that relate to general ambitions yet add little to this analysis. These include the follow-up on the 2008 Policy for Global Development (Regeringens skrivelse 2007b), the Policy for Security and Development in Swedish Development Cooperation 2011–2014 (Regeringskansliet 2010), the 2014 Platform for Development Cooperation (Regeringens skrivelse 2014), the 2016 Policy for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Assistance (Regeringens skrivelse 2016), the 2017 National Security Strategy (Regeringskansliet 2017b), and the Strategy for Sustainable Peace 2017–22 (Regeringskansliet 2017a).

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