This article addresses the contextual conditions for the implementation and development of public health work in local government administration. Given the crucial role of local governments in fostering holistic, community-based health strategies, the integration of public health initiatives into local political and administrative structures remains under-emphasized in both practice and research. Through focus group interviews in six municipalities, the study explores the institutional and organizational boundaries that shape the political and administrative context of local public health work. The findings reveal a gap between the strategic, municipality-wide work and the operational work focused on children and youth within welfare services, such as schools and social services. The challenges in implementing and developing local working methods for public health work in relation to the sectorized administration are particularly identified. This challenge is understood as a tension between traditional, sectorized welfare policies and cross-sectoral public health policies. The analysis underscores that a thorough understanding of the political and administrative context is essential for building effective public health strategies. The article advocates viewing local public health work as a dynamic process, emphasizing the importance of managing change rather than establishing a fixed order. Furthermore, we emphasize the significant need for continued practice-oriented research to develop an understanding of local public health work by integrating knowledge of interventions and medical aspects of health with contextual and implementation-oriented knowledge of the institutional and organizational conditions within local government organizations.

Matsäkerhet har blivit en alltmer brännande fråga för många utvecklade välfärdsstater och sårbarheten i komplext sammanvävda internationella matsystem gör att forskare framhävt betydelsen av lokala matsystem där kommuner spelar en avgörande roll. Mot den bakgrunden undersöks i den här studien hur frågor om matsäkerhet ger avtryck i kommunal policy, planering och administration i Sverige. Därutöver undersöks hur matsäkerhet förstås och ramas i på ett mer övergripande plan i relation till en lokal kontext. Studien, som bland annat bygger på en omfattande dokumentkartläggning, visar tydligt att frågor som rör matsäkerhet inte behandlas på något systematiskt sätt i kommunala planer eller policyer. Genom deltagande observationer visas även att frågor om matsäkerhet aktualiseras i relation till en krisberedskapsdiskussion, men att frågan inte kan diskuteras systematiskt då matsäkerhet och krisberedskap saknar förankring i formell policy, planering och administration. Studien visar på ett trängande behov av, men också institutionella svårigheter i att hantera matsäkerhet på ett mer strukturerat sätt.

As more and more policy problems are framed and understood as wicked, complex, and unmanageable, public administrators are supposed to act like entrepreneurs in search of creative ways to solve or handle a public problem. As a result, an entrepreneurial logic seems to be established in government administration. This paper aims to describe – but first and foremost to encourage a critical discussion about – the consequences of entrepreneurial logic. The concluding arguments are twofold. First, the entrepreneurial logic could be seen as a “bull in a china shop”, turning established orders upside down. Although the entrepreneurial logic is institutionalized in specific policy areas, it represents a fundamental break with local governments’ still dominant, bureaucratic-rational logic. Second, the entrepreneurial logic is like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”. The entrepreneurial logic appears attractive to legitimacy-seeking organizations, being associated with creativity, development, and growth. However, it risks undermining fundamental bureaucratic values, as well as the institutional pillars of representative democracy. 

Background: There is overwhelming evidence for the preventive effects of regular physical activity and healthy eating habits on the risk for developing a non-communicable disease (NCD). Increasing attention has been paid to community-wide approaches in the battle against NCDs. Communities can create supportive policies, modify physical environments, and foster local stakeholder engagement through intersectoral collaboration to encourage communities to support healthy lifestyles. The Pep initiative is based on intersectoral community-wide collaboration among Sweden’s municipalities. Primary targets are municipality professionals who work with children and young people as well as parents of children <18 years. The goal is to spread knowledge and create commitment to children’s and young people’s health with a special focus on physical activity and healthy eating habits to facilitate and support a healthy lifestyle. The overarching aim of the research project described in this study protocol is to investigate factors that influence the implementation of the Pep initiative in Sweden, to inform tailored implementation strategies addressing the needs and local prerequisites of the different municipalities.

Methods: The project includes a qualitative and a quantitative study and is framed by a theoretical model involving four complementary forms of knowledge, explicitly recognized in the Pep initiative: knowledge about the issue; knowledge about interventions; knowledge about the context; and knowledge about implementation. Study 1 is a focus group study exploring barriers and facilitators for implementing the Pep initiative. The study will be carried out in six municipalities, selected purposively to provide wide variation in municipality characteristics, including population size and geographical location. Data will be analyzed using thematic analysis. Study 2 is a cross-sectional web-based survey investigating the implementability of the Pep initiative in Sweden’s 290 municipalities. Conditions for implementing different areas of the Pep initiative will be examined in terms of the acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility, three predictors of implementation success. Data will be analyzed using non-parametric statistics.

Discussion: The findings of the two studies will increase understanding of the prerequisites for implementing the Pep initiative in Swedish municipalities, which will provide valuable input into how implementation of the Pep initiative can best be facilitated in the different municipality settings.

Denna rapport handlar om villkor och förutsättningar för folkhälsoarbete i svenska kommuner. Kommunernas roll i folkhälsopolitiken är komplex, föränderlig och saknar tydlig reglering. Samtidigt som rollen är oklar, ansvarar kommunerna för mycket av det som påverkar befolkningens hälsa, såsom skola och utbildning, sociala verksamheter, fritid och stadsplanering. Dessutom möter Sveriges kommuner idag ökade förväntningar när det kommer till att hantera en tilltagande ojämlikhet i hälsa bland barn och unga. I rapporten undersöks de institutionella och organisatoriska villkor som påverkar kommunernas folkhälsoarbete genom en fallstudie av Generation Peps pilotprojekt Pep Kommun.

Pep Kommun är ett pilotprojekt initierat av Generation Pep, en icke-vinstdrivande organisation. Pilotprojektet syftar till att utveckla och testa insatser för att främja barns och ungas hälsa i sex kommuner. Genom fokusgruppsintervjuer med deltagare från de sex deltagande kommunerna nås en djupare förståelse för de spänningar och ibland skiftande logiker som formar villkoren för hur lokalt folkhälsoarbete kan bedrivas.

Rapporten visar på en klyfta mellan det strategiska, kommunövergripande arbetet som Pep Kommun haft för ambition att utveckla, och det operativa arbetet med framförallt barn och unga som bedrivs inom ramen för kommunernas välfärdsarbete med skola, fritid och social verksamhet. Framför allt identifieras utmaningar i att implementera och utveckla lokala arbetsformer för folkhälsoarbete i relation till den sektoriserade förvaltningen. Denna utmaning förstås som en spänning mellan den traditionella och sektoriserade välfärdspolitiken visavi den tvärsektoriella folkhälsopolitiken.

Resultaten innebär inte att tvärsektoriellt och strategiskt folkhälsoarbete är helt skilt ifrån det sektoriserade välfärdsarbetet. Men det innebär att olika delar av kommunal verksamhet med bäring på barn och ungas hälsa vilar på olika traditioner, olika former för styrning, olika professionell kunskap liksom skilda organisatoriska och politiska kontexter. Detta behöver hanteras för att ett tvärsektoriellt och kommungemensamt folkhälsoarbete ska kunna utvecklas.

Avslutningsvis diskuteras behovet av att förstå den lokala kontexten som en dynamisk spelplan liksom vikten av att hantera förändring istället för att etablera en fixerad ordning för lokalt folkhälsoarbete. Vi menar också att det krävs ett kontinuerligt arbete att skapa klarhet kring vad kommunerna vill med sitt folkhälsoarbete (exempelvis i form av medverkan i Pep Kommun). Därtill menar vi att en större konceptuell klarhet kring vad kommunalt folkhälsoarbete är och förväntas vara måste utvecklas i dialog mellan statliga myndigheter, regioner och kommuner.

Sammanfattningsvis bidrar rapporten med kunskap om villkor och förutsättning för folkhälsoarbete på kommunal nivå genom att peka på centrala institutionella och organisatoriska spänningar. Samtidigt pekar rapporten på att det finns ett stort behov av att fortsatt – i framtida praktiknära forskning – utveckla förståelsen för lokalt folkhälsoarbete genom att integrera kunskap om interventioner och medicinska aspekter av hälsa, med kontextuell och implementeringsinriktad kunskap om folkhälsoarbetets kommunala styrning och organisering.

This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of entrepreneurship as an ideal and practice in local government administration. Organization, practices and the roles of civil servants in public administration are all grounded in certain ideals of what a modern public administration should look like. In order to capture the relationship between ideals and practices in local government administration, this introductory essay takes its point of departure in an institutional logic perspective.

Entrepreneurial practices are well documented in a public administration context. Both civil servants and organizations can be more or less creative, alert and energetic, in other words more or less entrepreneurial. However, practices such as these are often understood to derive from the motives, driving forces and extraordinary characteristics of the specific actor. By contrast, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature on public administrative trends and reforms, by discussing entrepreneurship in terms of institutionalized ideals and patterns of action, i.e., institutional logics.

The analysis is based on empirical studies of local development work in ten Swedish municipalities. The research design is grounded in an interpretative ethnographic approach and the development projects in each of the municipalities were closely followed for three years. Local development work is studied as a policy field where entrepreneurial ideals and practices are likely to arise, making it a suitable subject for studies that aim to deepen the theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship in a public administration context.

The thesis demonstrates how an entrepreneurial logic is institutionalized in local government development work and embedded in governance and administrative practices as a natural consequence of certain contemporary reforms and trends in local policy and administration.Through ethnographic studies of local development work, the ideals and practices of the entrepreneurial logic are made visible. The entrepreneurial logic is contrasted to the still prevalent and institutionalized bureaucratic- rational administrative logic. These two logics are in many respects the logical opposite of one another and provide different answers to the question of which administrative practices are appropriate.

The thesis makes three contributions to different theoretical discussions. First, the clarification of the entrepreneurial logic helps both researchers and practitioners make sense of and bring conceptual order to the messy practices of local development work.

Second, the entrepreneurial logic expands the concept of entrepreneurship in a public sector context by viewing entrepreneurship as an institutional phenomenon rather than a phenomenon that represents a break from traditional institutions.

Third, the entrepreneurial logic sheds light on institutionalized administrative ideals and practices that potentially imply major changes in public administration legitimacy, values and norms.

Local development practitioners in local government administration play a significant role in the governance of local development. This category of public officials – development officers, managers, strategists, secretaries, etc. – have received some attention in the local development literature. However, the directions in the literature are just as varied as the descriptions of the different aspects of local development governance they are taking part in. That means that the overarching understanding of what local development practitioners actually do is blurred, and is left to detailed case studies with very little or no conceptual ambition. Against this backdrop, the ambition of this article is to grasp what the local development practitioner role consists of at a conceptual level.

This article offers a better understanding of what local development practitioner roles in particular consist of and how these roles relate to existing theories of governance and public administration. In order to do so, we first clarify and refine what the literature has stressed about local development practitioners’ roles and functions, and cluster the findings into three theoretically separated roles: the coordinator, the creator and the inside lobbyist. Second, we bridge these roles with recent trends in public administration research. Finally, we discuss how this conceptualization informs us about governance modes of local development, as well as ‘new and modern’ public official roles in local government administration.

This article takes the standpoint that, due to high levels of uncertainty, local economic development work suffers from both input- and output-based legitimacy. Nevertheless, local governments are active development agents and try to come up with economic development initiatives. In order to better understand the legitimate basis for uncertain economic development work, this article offers an unconventional analysis of economic development projects. Drawing on scholars of organization theory, legitimacy is defined as congruence in values between the studied projects and the stakeholders in the surrounding environment. The article examines what kinds of values pervade local governments’ economic development projects. The empirical material is based on thick interview and observation data derived from a study of eight local development projects in Sweden. The results show that values of professionalization and deliberation pervade the analysed projects. Taking the two sets of values together, the results indicate that local government administration seeks to legitimize its economic development work as being based on professional directed processes of public deliberation. Both these sets of values challenge the local representative democratic system of government as the prime source of the legitimacy of local governments’ interventions.

Besöksnäringen lyfts fram som allt viktigare för utveckling och tillväxt på den svenska landsbygden. Besöksnäringen har ett antal särskilda karaktärsdrag som är viktiga att känna till om branschen ska kunna nå den potential den ofta tillskrivs.

Besöksnäringen är platsspecifik och måste därför utvecklas i relation till platsens natur, kultur och sociala karaktärsdrag.

En destination utgörs ofta av ett stort antal, små och stora, kommersiella och icke-kommersiella aktörer, vilket skapar utmaningar när det kommer till styrning av besöksnäringens utveckling.

Besöksnäringens utveckling kantas av att olika intressen möts och ibland hamnar i konflikt med varandra. För att besöksnäringens utveckling ändå ska kunna styras krävs ett aktivt ledarskap och forum för strategisk styrning.