to cities in the global south, from sweden with...

SIMON RUNSTEN

Tracing the Export of Swedish Urban Sustainability

To Cities in the Global South,

From Sweden with Love

The idea behind the dust jacket of this thesis,

inspired by Hult (2017), is to graphically

play with how the concept of Swedish urban

sustainability has been packaged to travel to

low-income cities in the Global South. The

use of the term love refers to the attraction

which I argue that the Sustainable City

concept has had on a wide range of actors.

More intuitively perhaps, it also helps to

emphasize how this export, regardless of the

critical stance I at times assume, has of course

always been well intended. The postal stamp

in the upper right corner depicts the Turning

Torso, which is a landmark in the Swedish

urban flagship district Västra hamnen in

Malmö. With it, I refer to the remarkable

stability I note that these districts have

assumed as role models in the export of

Swedish urban sustainability. The priority

stamp on the back hints at the sense of

urgency which has come to shape its

packaging.

Cover artwork by the author.

“Par Avion” illustration released

under Creative Commons CC0.

Turning Torso stamp retrieved

from Postmuseum.



Tracing the Export of

Swedish Urban Sustainability

by

Simon Runsten



Tracing the Export of

Swedish Urban Sustainability

av

Simon Runsten

i

Master of Science Thesis

INDEK 2017:52



Simon Runsten

Approved

2017-06-05

Examiner

Cali Nuur

Supervisor

Pär Blomkvist

Commissioner

Contact person

Abstract

Rapid urbanization and limited resources is creating enormous challenges to cities in the global South, which has been increasingly acknowledged as a motivation for international cooperation in recent years. Both theory and practice have however paid little attention to how differences in geographical contexts and views on what sustainability is play out in such cooperation. This study therefore explores how Swedish actors have sought to contribute to urban sustainability in low-income countries in the Global South. These efforts are traced through a case study of the Swedish SymbioCity concept by using an actor-network theory approach. Policy mobility theory is used to discuss how the transfer and translation of policies between cities takes focus away from their contested nature. Concepts are then drawn from socio-technical transitions theory to discuss what this specifically means in transitioning towards sustainability. Data is gathered through review of written materials and semi-structured interviews with actors in the case study.

ii

In following the evolution of the Sustainable City concept, I argue that it has managed to mutate so well “from trade to aid” due to its “fluid” and lovable qualities and a notion of Swedish urban sustainability which can be flexibly interpreted. In tracing the networking of Swedish sustainability, I argue that SymbioCity has followed a previously observed pattern in which the approach has been adapted to travel and the recipients have been prepared to receive the approach. In considering how the approach has impacted its recipients, I argue that although its applications seem to have been appreciated, the translation of urban sustainability throughout the network has turned focus away from the issue of what urban sustainability is by coordinating activities and by educating the recipients’ attention towards techno-managerial problem framings.

I conclude that Swedish actors have managed to carefully adopt a commercial model of urban sustainability to the purposes of development cooperation and its geographical contexts of application. While this mutation has given rise to a network of somewhat disconnected practices, the efforts of both branches have nevertheless contributed to establishing sustainability as being fundamentally uncontested in its nature. This view of sustainability can be said to be permitted by certain interpretations of the Swedish experience of becoming more sustainable. From this I conclude that to ensure that international cooperation for urban sustainability takes place on equal and fundamentally democratic terms, Swedish actors (and sustainability transition theorists alike) would do well to also encourage and facilitate inclusive and critical discussions of how urban sustainability can be understood, in the North as well as the South. The main limitation of this work lies in the actual engagement with the targeted cities, which prevents a thorough understanding of both the perceived and the actual impact of the export of Swedish urban sustainability. Further research should therefore pay attention to how it has affected the targeted cities.

Key words: Urban sustainability, Development cooperation, Actor-network, Policy mobility, Socio-technical transitions

iii

Examensarbete

INDEK 2017:52



Simon Runsten

Godkänt

2017-06-05

Examinator

Cali Nuur

Handledare

Pär Blomkvist

Uppdragsgivare Kontaktperson

Sammanfattning

Hög urbaniseringstakt i kombination med begränsade resurser skapar enorma utmaningar för städer på södra halvklotet, vilket under de senaste åren i allt högre grad betraktats som en motivation för en intensifiering av internationellt samarbete. Både teori och praktik har emellertid ägnat lite uppmärksamhet åt hur skillnader i geografiska sammanhang och sätt att se på hållbarhet inverkar på sådant samarbete. Den här studien undersöker därför hur svenska aktörer har försökt bidra till hållbara städer i låginkomstländer på södra halvklotet. Dessa försök utforskas genom en fallstudie av det svenska SymbioCity-konceptet med hjälp av aktör-nätverksteori. Teori om policyrörlighet används för att diskutera hur överföringen och översättningen av praktiker mellan städer vänder fokus bort från deras omtvistbara natur. Begrepp hämtas sedan från teori om omvandling av socio-tekniska system för att diskutera vad detta specifikt innebär i termer av omställning mot hållbarhet. Data samlas in genom granskning av skriftligt material och semi-strukturerade intervjuer med aktörer i fallstudien.

iv

Jag avhandlar tre faser i utvecklingen av det svenska konceptet för urban hållbarhet. Initiativet att exportera svensk kompetens inom urban hållbarhet uppstod i första fasen ur intresset att kombinera stadsplanering med export av miljöteknik, som inspirerades av svenska aktörers deltagande i en tävling om stadsplanering i Kina. Behovet av att kommunicera svensk urban hållbarhet på internationella arenor ledde till slut till att detta intresse tog formen av Sustainable City-konceptet. Konceptet marknadsfördes med en berättelse om Sveriges frikoppling av koldioxidutsläpp och ekonomisk tillväxt. Konceptet har sedermera etablerats som en obligatorisk passagepunkt i aktörsnätverket för att hjälpa svenska företag att sälja miljöteknik till nya marknader.

I andra fasen identifierade Sida behovet av ett integrerat tillvägagångssätt för stadsplanering, såsom Sustainable City-konceptet, i låginkomstländer. Detta ledde till tillämpningen av konceptet i två pilotstudier och utvecklingen av en manual. Sida bjöds senare in av Business Sweden för att i kommunikationssyfte bilda ett gemensamt koncept för svensk urban hållbarhet, som kom att kallas SymbioCity.

I tredje fasen överfördes tillämpningen av tillvägagångssättet för stadsplanering i låginkomstländer från Sida till SKL International. Förutom att dela Sidas avsikt om att bistå fattiga städer med stadsplanering, har övergången också betraktats som ett sätt att bygga upp kapacitet i urban hållbarhet inom SKL International:s nätverk. Tillvägagångssättet tillämpades på ytterligare pilotprojekt, en andra rapport utvecklades och ytterligare dokument utvecklades för att operationalisera och sprida konceptet. Detta bidrog till att etablera SymbioCity-konceptet som en obligatorisk passagepunkt i stadsplaneringsnätverket. Även om det har funnits avsikter att skapa ett gemensamt koncept, kan SKL International sägas ha etablerat sig som en im-passagepunkt mellan de två grenarna i nätverket.

I kartläggningen av utvecklingen av Sustainable City-konceptet argumenterar jag för att det har kunnat anpassats så bra från marknadsföring till utvecklingssamarbete på grund av vissa "flytande" och ”älskvärda” egenskaper, samt en tolkningsflexibel uppfattning om svensk urban hållbarhet. I spårandet av nätverkandet av svensk hållbarhet argumenterar jag för att SymbioCity har följt ett tidigare observerat

v

mönster där tillvägagångssättet har paketerats för att spridas och där mottagarna har blivit förberedda på att ta emot det. När jag överväger hur tillvägagångssättet har påverkat sina mottagare argumenterar jag för att även om dess tillämpningar tycks ha varit uppskattade, så har översättningen av urban hållbarhet i hela nätverket vridit fokus bort från frågan om vad urban hållbarhet faktiskt är genom samordning av aktiviteter och riktande av mottagarnas uppmärksamhet mot tekniska och organisatoriska problemformuleringar.

Jag drar slutsatsen att svenska aktörer framgångsrikt har anpassat en modell för hållbar stadsutveckling med kommersiellt ursprung till utvecklingssamarbetesändamål och de därför avsedda geografiska tillämpningsområdena. Även om denna anpassning har givit upphov till ett nätverk av åtskilda praktiker, har båda grenarnas verksamheter verkat för att befästa hållbarhetsbegreppet som fundamentalt obestritt. Denna syn på hållbarhet kan sägas ha blivit möjlig genom vissa tolkningar av den svenska erfarenheten att bli mer hållbar. För att säkerställa att internationellt samarbete för urban hållbarhet sker på lika och grundläggande demokratiska villkor, föreslår jag att svenska aktörer (och teoretiker tillika) också kan uppmuntra och underlätta inkluderande och kritiska diskussioner om hur hållbarhet kan förstås, i städer på södra så väl som på norra halvklotet. Den främsta begränsningen i detta arbete är den i engagemanget med städerna i fråga, vilket förhindrar en grundlig förståelse för både den upplevda och den faktiska effekten av exporten av svensk urban hållbarhet. Ytterligare forskning bör därför inriktas på hur exporten av svensk urban hållbarhet har påverkat de avsedda städerna.

Key words: Urban hållbarhet, Utvecklingssamarbete, Aktörs-nätverk, Policyrörlighet, Socio-teknisk omvandling

vi

Table of Contents

Abstract ...................................................................................................................... i

Sammanfattning ...................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ................................................................................................... vi

List of Figures ....................................................................................................... viii

List of Tables ........................................................................................................... ix

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. x

1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Background ................................................................................................. 3

1.2 Problematization ........................................................................................ 6

1.3 Purpose and Research Questions ............................................................ 7

1.4 Contribution ............................................................................................... 8

1.5 Delimitations ............................................................................................... 8

1.6 Disposition of the Thesis .......................................................................... 9

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 10

2 Previous Research ............................................................................................. 11

2.1 North-South Transfer of Urban Sustainability as Anti-Political ...... 13

2.2 Swedish Expertise in Development Cooperation ............................... 14

2.3 The Swedish City as a Role Model ........................................................ 17

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 20

3 Theoretical Framing .......................................................................................... 21

3.1 Socio-Technical Transitions Theory and Sustainability Transitions 23

3.2 Actor-Network Theory: Material-Semiotic Toolbox ......................... 30

3.3 Policy Mobility Theory: Circulation of Expertise ............................... 34

3.4 Applied Analytical Approach and Concepts ....................................... 36

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 38

4 Method ................................................................................................................ 39

4.1 Research Approach .................................................................................. 41

4.2 Data Collection ......................................................................................... 42

4.3 Research Quality ...................................................................................... 44

4.4 Research Process ...................................................................................... 45

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 46

vii

5 Introduction to the SymbioCity Approach ................................................... 47

5.1 SymbioCity as a Conceptual Framework ............................................. 49

5.2 Working Procedure in the Approach .................................................... 51

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 52

6 Three Phases of the Actor-Networking ........................................................ 53

6.1 Exporting Environmental Technology through Urban Planning .... 55

6.2 Adding Development Expertise to the Sustainable City Concept ... 60

6.3 Building and Networking Municipal Expertise ................................... 63

6.4 Overview of Documents and Events ................................................... 67

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 70

7 Mutation, Promotion and Impact of the SymbioCity Approach .............. 71

7.1 Mutating the Concept for Development Cooperation ...................... 73

7.2 Promoting Swedish Urban Sustainability to the Global South......... 79

7.3 The Impact of Circulating and Performing Swedish Sustainability . 84

7.4 Summary of Translations of Urban Sustainability .............................. 87

Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 92

8 Conclusions ........................................................................................................ 93

8.1 Summary of Findings .............................................................................. 95

8.2 Relating the Findings to the Literature ................................................. 98

8.3 Practical Implications of the Findings ................................................ 101

8.4 Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Further Research .... 103

Chapter Summary ................................................................................................ 104

References....................................................................................................................... a

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1 Socio-technical transitions as understood from the multi-level

perspective (2005). ......................................................................................... 24

Figure 2 Conceptual framework of the SymbioCity Approach. Source:

Ranhagen and Groth (2012). ........................................................................ 50

Figure 3 Aspects of sustainability in the SymbioCity Approach. Source:

Ranhagen and Groth (2012) ......................................................................... 50

Figure 4 Stakeholder involvement as suggested by the approach.

Source: Andersson et al. (2014) .................................................................... 52

Figure 5 The SymbioCity graph, illustrating the Swedish experience of

decoupling economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. Source:

Hult (2013). ..................................................................................................... 58

Figure 6Visit of Kenyan council of governors to Hammarby Sjöstad,

Sweden. Source: Omenya and Krook (2014). Cropped by the author. . 76

Figure 7 Sketch of the Actor-Network(s) of Swedish Urban

Sustainability Export ...................................................................................... 90

ix

List of Tables

Table 1 List of consulted informants .......................................................... 43

Table 2 Timeline of documents describing the Sustainable City concept

........................................................................................................................... 68

Table 3 Timeline of a selection of events in evolution of SymbioCity. . 69

Table 4 Analysis of the actor-network using Hallström’s (2003, p. 52)

traits .................................................................................................................. 87

Table 5 Tracing of the Translations of Swedish Urban Sustainability in

the Actor-Network of SymbioCity. ............................................................. 88

x

Acknowledgements

While I am the solemn and responsible author of this work, the process

of writing it has undoubtedly been supported by innumerable others.

Here I would like to the opportunity to thank some of those of particular

importance. Firstly, I would like to thank Pär Blomkvist who has

supervised the work by providing a productive container for the writing

process and by guiding me through the theoretical and methodological

jungle. I also owe thanks to David Nilsson and Peder Roberts at the

Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, and Anna

Hult and Nelson Ekane at the Department of Urban Planning and

Environment for their helpful comments on the thesis proposal. I would

also like to thank my peer students at the thesis seminar at the

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, KTH Royal

Institute of Technology, for providing constructive feed-back. Finally, I

would like to thank my family and friends for their unconditional support

in whatever I take on and wherever it takes me.

1

1 Introduction This chapter introduces the topic of exporting

Swedish expertise in urban sustainability to the Global South

and motivates the purpose and research questions of this work.

A background is provided of the challenges facing cities in the Global South

and how this challenge has been addressed through international development cooperation.

The lack of understanding of the contested nature of sustainability transitions

both in practice and theory is problematized to motivate investigation of

why and how the actor-network of Swedish urban sustainability export has emerged.

Lastly, necessary delimitations are presented followed by contributions

made by the investigation to literature and practice is presented.

The introduction is concluded with an overview of the disposition of the thesis.

2

“The increasing rapidity and scale of urbanisation,

especially in areas of Asia and Africa, presents a vast and

urgent need for more holistic governance and planning of

urban development. Though urbanisation generates

significant environmental and socioeconomic challenges, it is

essentially a positive phenomenon. With proper governance

and planning, urbanisation can contribute to improved

livelihoods and social values, ethnic and cultural

integration, extension of democratic rights and poverty

alleviation. Urbanisation can enhance political, cultural

and economic development and living conditions. ”

Background to the SymbioCity Approach

(Ranhagen and Groth, 2012, p. 8)

INTRODUCTION

3

1.1 Background

This chapter provides a background to the export of Swedish urban sustainability

expertise to the Global South. First the challenge of urban sustainability in the Global

South is briefly presented, followed by an introduction and critique of how this challenge

is addressed through international cooperation. I then address a blind spot in the

literature, on how such cooperation seeks to influence transitions towards urban

sustainability. This is followed by an introduction to the Swedish SymbioCity concept

as a case of such cooperation.

The Sustainability Challenge of Cities in the Global South

It has been widely cited that 2008 was the year in which the world’s urban

population outgrew the non-urban (UN, 2015). By 2030, almost 60 per

cent of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas and 95

per cent of urban expansion over the next decades will take place in the

so called developing world. Rapid urbanization is exerting pressure on

fresh water supplies, sewage, the living environment, and public health.

However, the high density of cities is also thought to enable efficiency

gains and technological innovation, while at the same time reducing

resource and energy consumption. Sustainable cities is thus prioritized as

one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Agenda

2030 (UN, 2016a), and has also been given attention through the

development and adoption of the New Urban Agenda (UN Habitat,

2017). Cities in the Global South1, subjected to limited resources and

strong pressures of urbanization, face an especially daunting challenge in

1 The term Global South is used here as a socio-economic and political reference, not always coincident with the southern hemisphere. The term is recognized as a contested construct encompassing a diverse set of contexts with limited economic and political resources in relation to a globalized economy. For further discussion, see Pagel et al. (2014) and Hollington et. al. (2015). While actors in the study at times refer to “developing countries”, I use the term “Global South” as a part of trying to maintain a neutral position with regards to what is to be considered developed or sustainable. When contextual characteristics such as income levels are relevant I refer directly to those.

BACKGROUND

4

this regard (Patel et al., 2015). At the same time, it has been suggested

(though not without contest (Rock et al., 2009)), that such cities also hold

the opportunity to “leapfrog” development, i.e. to avoid the mistakes of

so called developed countries and directly implement more sustainable

modes of production and consumption (Tukker, 2005; Poustie et al.,

2016).

International Development Cooperation and Urban Sustainability

Local governments across the Global South have often, encouraged by

donors and aid agencies, resorted to adopting “best practices” of city

development motivated by the sense urgency indicated by the quote

introducing this chapter. This adoption of best practices has however

tended to obscure the politics of urban sustainability and led to an often

uncritical replication of solutions between cities and countries (Patel et

al., 2015). Such uncritical replication of solutions between the Global

North and the South also appears notably counterproductive to attempts

of leapfrogging, as leapfrogging was defined as avoiding the mistakes of

the so called developed countries in search for more sustainable ones,

especially to the extent of which the sustainability of solutions in cities in

the North can be questioned (Binz et al., 2012). At the level of theory,

urban scholarship has also been criticized for what is considered uncritical

adoption of both practices and theory springing from the Global North.

It has therefor been argued that a provincialization (i.e. provincial re-

orientation) of global urbanism is necessary to challenge urban theories

that treat Northern urbanization as the norm, to incorporate expertise

and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative

urban futures (Sheppard et al., 2013). Similarly, the necessity of a critical

view on the framing of sustainability itself has also been pointed out

(Lawhon and Murphy, 2012). International initiatives for sustainable

urban development can thus be understood as epistemologically and

politically loaded, and at times contested, engagements with the Global

South, in which specific qualities of the initiative and the place meet.

INTRODUCTION

5

The Lack of Power and Place in Sustainability Transitions Theory

Research on sustainability transitions has largely been oriented around

single countries and simply assumed that innovations spread from

“enlightened” “developed” countries to countries less so. However, in

recent years initiatives oriented towards sustainability transitions in the

Global South have been multiplying (Truffer, 2012; Truffer et al., 2015).

A perspective which has become a compelling mode of analysis of urban

sustainability transitions is the multi-level perspective (MLP) (Lawhon

and Murphy, 2012). It enables such analysis by mapping out the co-

evolutionary process between incumbent socio-technical configurations

(regimes), emerging alternatives (niches), and developments or events in

the system environment (landscape) that can lead to deeper structural

change (Geels, 2002). Sustainability transitions are conceptualized as

shifts from what is considered an unsustainable socio-technical regime

towards a more sustainable one, through an interplay of forces at the

different levels (Truffer and Coenen, 2012). Drawing lessons from this

field, transitions management provides a prescriptive framework for how

such transitions should be approached. However, applications of the

MLP have tended to lack political aspects, and neither considered

geography sufficiently (Lawhon and Murphy, 2012; Smith et al., 2010).

Especially, there has been a lack of engagement with the Global South in

socio-technical transition theory (Lawhon and Murphy, 2012). Recent

research has therefore engaged in trying to bridge the gap between

geography and transitions theory (Hansen and Coenen, 2015; Truffer et

al., 2015), notably also in the urban context of the Global South (Ernstson

et al., 2010). However, it seems no work has yet explicitly considered the

influence of international development cooperation initiatives on urban

sustainability transitions innovation niches.

PROBLEMATIZATION

6

Export of Swedish Expertise in Urban Sustainability

An initiative for international development cooperation for sustainable

cities based in Sweden is SymbioCity (formerly Sustainable City). As a

government initiative run jointly by Business Sweden (promoting national

exports on behalf of the Swedish government and industry) and SKL

International (supporting cities in developing countries to plan and build

sustainably) with support from the Swedish international development

agency (Sida), it is a platform for Swedish know-how in sustainable urban

development, using amongst other elements so called good practices. As

a framework, the so called SymbioCity Approach gathers Swedish

methodology for and experiences of sustainable urban development

(SymbioCity, 2016). It provides an interesting case both for engaging with

the transfer of urban sustainability across geographies and for

constructive engagement with sustainability transitions theory. The

intentions and strategies of its actors have so far only been studied with a

focus on the promotion of environmental technology (Hult, 2013; Mejía-

Dugand, 2016).

1.2 Problematization

While international partnerships are considered key in addressing the

sustainability challenges of cities around the world (UN, 2016a, 2016b),

practice as well as theory has thus far tended to disregard the contexts in

which sustainability is to be achieved, the diversity of interpretations of

what sustainability is and different standpoints on how it should be

achieved (Guy and Marvin, 1999; Smith et al., 2010; Lawhon and Murphy,

2012; Sheppard et al., 2013; Patel et al., 2015). The literature has also paid

insufficient attention to how actors in such partnerships and their

approaches seek to influence urban sustainability transitions, especially in

the Global South (Lawhon and Murphy, 2012). While Sweden has been

an early player in urban sustainability export, the intentions and strategies

of its actors have so far only been studied with a focus on the promotion

of environmental technology.

INTRODUCTION

7

1.3 Purpose and Research Questions

The goal of this work is to contribute to an emerging field of research at

the intersection of sustainability transitions theory and human geography

by providing an understanding of how international cooperation

initiatives seek to affect the conditions for sustainability transitions. The

purpose of the study is to explore how Swedish actors have tried to

contribute to urban sustainability in low-income cities in the Global South

and how these efforts may have impacted its recipients. The purpose is

fulfilled by answering the general research question and its sub-questions

as follows:

Main RQ Why and how has the actor-network of Swedish

urban sustainability export to low-income contexts in the Global

South emerged?

RQ1 By whom and for what purposes was the Swedish concept

of urban sustainability developed?

RQ2 How has the Swedish concept of urban sustainability been

promoted and circulated to low-income cities in the Global South?

CONTRIBUTION

8

1.4 Contribution

By engaging with the above research questions, this work contributes to

scholarly literature on the empirical fields of Swedish aid, Swedish urban

sustainability and development cooperation for (urban) sustainability2. It

also makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to the field of

sustainability transitions by engaging in its conversation with other fields

and its expansion to previously understudied geographies. Lastly, the

review of the SymbioCity concept and its activities contributes practically

to practitioners involved in its network.

1.5 Delimitations

As is hopefully discernable from the background, there are many

questions related to striving for urban sustainability in the Global South

worth considering. This work is not meant to engage with the question of

what constitutes urban sustainability or determining whether the

approach is effective in promoting whatever it is thought to be across

space and between socio-economic contexts. It is rather meant to explore

how sustainability is negotiated and how this negotiation is affected by

the positionality of its negotiators. The work is furthermore delimited to

the case of SymbioCity and its extension to low-income cities in the

Global South. While delimiting its external validity to relations in other

constellations of countries and cities, this nevertheless provides valuable

empirics for both literature and theory, as suggested in section 1.4.

2 I have been made aware that another thesis is currently being written on the case of SymbioCity and how it translates urban sustainability across scales and space. Efforts to take part of it have however been unyielding. See Toni Adscheid, forthcoming master thesis at Stockholm University.

INTRODUCTION

9

1.6 Disposition of the Thesis

The succeeding chapters of this thesis are structured as follows. The

introductory part continues with chapter 2, introducing previous research

on transfer of policies for urban sustainability, historical examples of

Swedish export of expertise, and previous accounts of Swedish cities as

role models for urban sustainability. Chapter 3 introduces theory on

sustainability transitions and transfer of urban policies, as well as an

approach to tracing actor-networks. It is however worth pointing out that

previous research and theory overlap to some extent. My intention is

using the former section to point to the state of relevant empirical

knowledge, whereas the latter introduces useful theoretical approaches to

the analysis. Chapter 4 then motivates the case study method chosen to

explore the actor-networking of Swedish urban sustainability.

Chapter 5 introduces the analysis and argumentation by presenting the

SymbioCity Approach. Chapter 6 is dedicated to a chronology of what I

identify as three phases of the actor-networking of Swedish urban

sustainability. Chapter 7 presents what I argue to be three themes of the

actor-networking of the concept of Swedish urban sustainability, namely

how it has managed to mutate for various purposes and contexts, how it

was promoted to the context of the Global South, and how the circulation

and performance of it has impacted on its recipients. As the reader may

note, the analytical chapters 6 and 7 also overlap to some extent. To clarify

the analysis, these chapters are therefore concluded with overviews of

central events and documents (section 6.4) and central translations

(section 7.4)

In the concluding chapter 8, I first summarize my findings by responding

to the research questions. I then relate the study to previous research and

the theoretical debate on sustainability transitions (outlined in chapter 3).

I also provide some practical implications of the findings. Lastly, I note

some limitations of the thesis, from which I make suggestions for further

research. An overview of the thesis can be obtained by reading the

summaries at the end of each chapter.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

10

Chapter Summary

This chapter has introduced the topic of exporting Swedish expertise in urban

sustainability to the Global South. Rapid urbanization and limited resources is

creating enormous challenges to cities in the Global South, while sustainable cities have

also come to be seen as a necessary part of sustainable development in general. While

local governments in the Global South have often, encouraged by donors and aid

agencies, resorted to adopting practices from the global North, this has tended to

disregard differences in geographical context, access to resources and views on how

sustainability should be understood. Sweden, a respected actor in both urban

sustainability and development cooperation, and its SymbioCity concept constitutes a

case of transferring practices for urban sustainability to cities in the Global South. This

study explores how Swedish actors have sought to contribute to urban sustainability in

the Global South through the Sustainable City and later SymbioCity concept.

11

2 Previous Research This chapter presents previous research relevant to the study.

This includes research showing how transfer of policies

for urban sustainability has become depoliticized,

historical examples of Swedish export of expertise,

and previous accounts of Swedish cities

as role models for urban sustainability.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH

13

2.1 North-South Transfer of Urban Sustainability

as Anti-Political

Urban sustainability policy and its North-South transfer has been argued

to have become depoliticized as a part of the wide-spread acclaim of

consensual approaches towards sustainability (Raco and Lin, 2012;

Beveridge and Koch, 2017). This depoliticized or anti-political policy

mobility is attributable both to an historically consistent will to keep urban

policy mobility networks intact but also to more recent broader anti-

political trends in society (Clarke, 2012a). This broader trend consists in

practices of contributing to urban sustainability being increasingly

oriented towards a “Third Way” in which governance is reconfigured as

consensus-oriented multi-stakeholder processes in which traditional state

forms (various levels of government) partake alongside with experts,

NGO’s and other responsible partners.

This Third Way is propagated by post-political writers through depictions

of politics having moved beyond class-politics, leaving no alternative but

to focus on non-adversarial politics (Raco and Lin, 2012). The underlying

normative affirmation is that there is no alternative to sustainable urban

development and that a failure will result in apocalypse (Mössner, 2016),

ultimately necessitating “urgent, sustained and consensual action”

(Swyngedouw, 2009, p. 602). This opens up an opportunity for elites to

roll out sustainability policies, often involving “reshaping local

development practices, techniques of management and technologies of

government” (Raco and Lin, 2012). Contemporary political theorists

argue that depoliticized discourses have been hegemonic over the last

decades” (Žižek, 2000; Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2010). Such

discourses have in turn been argued to have motivated consensus

thinking and a technical and managerial view of politics, risking to shift

attention away from grass root concerns over global developmentalism

(Raco and Lin, 2012). Exactly how these post-political agendas are

SWEDISH EXPERTISE IN DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

14

constructed and what rationalities underpin them in different

geographical contexts has however been little explored (Raco and Lin,

2012).

Indeed, it has been shown that consensus-building can serve as a political

strategy which aims to depoliticize sustainable urban development and to

relocate the decision making process outside societal debate (Mössner,

2016). In transferring urban policies, McCann and Ward (2010) have

described how policies get translated or reduced into models that travel,

whereas destinations are subjected to discursive preparation through

briefing papers, study tours, etc. It has furthermore been shown that

Northern cities have at times taken on the role of experts in North-South

interurban partnerships as a means to gain access to funding, and that

cultures of accountability (i.e. expectations to deliver results) have favored

short-term and delimited projects over well-crafted partnerships (Clarke,

2012b).

2.2 Swedish Expertise in Development Cooperation

While acknowledging the multiple de- and connotations of the concept,

Bruno (2016) broadly refers development as a process of socioeconomic

change in the form of modernization, carried out by technical experts,

state officials or peasants, whereas development aid aims to facilitate

actions leading to it. He notes that the intellectual origins of development

assistance have been traced to progress and development as central

tenants of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment. In the

nineteenth century, the concept of development was explicitly linked to a

process of social progress through modernization. This understanding

among Western thinkers was a fundamentally ethnocentric and

uncriticizable one in which improvement and civilization came about

through the import of science and technology from the West (Sutton et

al., 1989). Since then, substantial criticism has been aimed at the concept

from many authors, of which Escobar’s (1995) is well-known.

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15

While few attempts have been made to engage with the actual activities

of Swedish development assistance from an ideological perspective, many

studies have discussed the interests driving Swedish development aid

policy (Öhman, 2007, pp. 22–23), which have been argued to range

between solidarity and commercial interests in extending trade. Öhman

herself (2007, p. 90) argues that during the course of Swedish

development aid, altruistic ideals and commercial interests have been

closely entangled. The development aid scholar Olav Stokke (1996) has

suggested that the aid programs of all Scandinavian countries were rooted

in values of international solidarity stemming from the dominance of

Social Democratic parties, lending basic altruistic features to their aid

interventions. Having no administrative burden from colonial territories

may also have increased the ability to provide aid. A lack of colonial

territories is nonetheless to be understood as lack of colonial interest.

Regardless of altruistic motives, the phenomenon of development aid

draws much of its meaning and coherence from colonial relationships.

This observation is emphasized by post-colonial perspectives of

development aid and its stressing of continuities between colonialism and

development aid, including discrimination and oppression (Bruno, 2016,

pp. 21–22). In relation to the promotion of Swedish expertise, it is worth

noting that Sweden has always emphasized that aid should not be used to

sell a Swedish model but rather that foreign aid can assist the realization

of the recipients’ visions for development (Danielson et al., 2005).

Bruno (2016) assumes that expert authority is a central defining

characteristic of modern society and consequently the development aid

which aims to reproduce it. He notes that expert knowledge is necessary

not just for solving problems but also to identify and legitimize methods

for their solution. He cites Zygmunt Bauman (1989, p. 220):

“technology does not serve the solution of problems; it is, rather,

the accessibility of a given technology that redefines successive

parts of human reality as problems clamouring for resolution.”

SWEDISH EXPERTISE IN DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

16

Technology thus seek applications through the problematizations of new

areas3. Drawing on Vandendriessche et al. (2015) and Stehr and

Grundmann (2011), he notes that this is a complicated process in which

experts do not act merely as neutral mediators of knowledge but actively

transform it through the performance of their expertise. This process, he

notes from the writings of Fergusson, is further complicated by the

observation that expertise tends to depoliticize matters, turning what is

social or political issues into technical ones, finding answers in expertise.

This tends to draw attention away from social injustices and to delimit

considerations to what is defined by the expert, thus often not accounting

for all the needs of the affected.

Bruno (2016) analyzes the role of agrarian expertise in Swedish

development aid between 1950 and 2009. He does so by responding to

three set of questions. The first is concerned with how Swedish expertise

came to be considered relevant in the context of aid. He identifies a

number of actors and explains how they were able to formulate

development problems which were compatible with the expertise

available at the Swedish universities of agrarian sciences and could be

accepted by financiers and the aid practitioners. He further shows how

these formulations also allowed fulfilment of other organizational goals

of the universities. The second set of questions is centered around how

the Swedish experts approached the problem of development and the

application of their own expertise in the context of aid. He shows that the

strategies proposed by the experts were understood as being grounded in

the Swedish context, which made them attentive to how technologies

were adapted and the importance of practical knowledge, but less so to

the societal contexts and the social effects of their involvements. The

3 The similiarity to Akrich’s (1992) notion of “technology as script”, of which I will make use

later in this thesis, is noteworthy.

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third set of questions is related to the institutional long-term cooperation

between Sida and one of the universities, SLU, focusing on how and why

it was created. He shows that while the cooperation was at times

unbalanced and the goals of the parties was different, it was at the same

time distinguished by a strong mutual sense of trust. Furthermore, Bruno

emphasizes previously shown links between aid and Swedish domestic

expertise, where Sweden, lacking a colonial base of knowledge, to a large

extent had to found their aid interventions on domestic knowledge and

on relations to other countries.

2.3 The Swedish City as a Role Model

Hult (2017, p. 5) traces the history of Sweden’s reputation of claiming to

be and being portrayed as one of the world’s “most progressive, modern,

equal and environmentally friendly countries” back to the so called

Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, placing Sweden as a central nation

internationally in modernism and functionalism (Rudberg, 1999). Around

40 years later, in 1972, Sweden hosted the first UN summit on the

environment, referred to as the Stockholm Conference, placing Sweden

as a central figure in international environmental affairs and later also in

sustainable development. In the line of these events, she places the 2010

World Expo in Shanghai, in which Swedish government bodies came

together with private actors to promote Sweden as a role model in urban

sustainability under the banner of “Better city, Better life”. She finds two

intentional logics behind the Swedish export of sustainable planning

services: to shape a better world and to export clean-tech products (Hult,

2015).

THE SWEDISH CITY AS A ROLE MODEL

18

Hult (2013) has explored how Swedish urban sustainability has been

promoted through the SymbioCity concept by engaging with the World

Expo in Shanghai. She takes a starting point in the Swedish pavilion there

and by using Actor-Network Theory (see chapter 3.2), considers it to be

a node in a wider network producing an image of Sweden as a role model

for urban sustainability. This allows her to trace the interests and

knowledges which have informed and shaped the production of this

image. The image is centered around a graph depicting Sweden’s

decoupling of economic growth and emissions of carbon dioxide, which

as she argues, is presented as a fact which lends authority to Swedish

experience and knowledge of urban sustainability. She argues that central

to the image presented is a view of sustainability in which “progress” is

equated with “decoupling” of economic growth and carbon dioxide

emissions. This Swedish experience, she argues, is furthermore portrayed

as transferable to China, which reproduces views of progress as being

linear and space as being static. Hult argues that this image, founded on a

production perspective of emissions, when viewed from the lens of a

consumption perspective, turns into a myth.

This storyline, Hult further argues (2017, p. 19), has been deliberately

linked to urban flagship districts such as Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm

and Västra Hamnen (Western Harbor) in Malmö. She problematizes the

promotion of these districts as best-practice in urban sustainability. Citing

Kreuger and Gibbs (2007), she notes that entire nations, Sweden among

them, have been pointed out as best-practice examples; and Fitzgerald

and Lenhart (2016) who point out that three of the most celebrated

European eco-districts are Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Västra

Hamnen in Malmö and Vauban in Freigburg. However, she notes,

Rutherford (2008) and Pandis Iveroth (2014) claim that there is more

environmental discourse than actual performance measurement of

Hammarby Sjöstad. Hult further places these cities in the line of fire of

environmental gentrification and reinforcement of an ecological

modernization discourse by drawing on Rutherford (2008) who portrays

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Hammarby Sjöstad as being purposely kept a green middle-class enclave

through housing policy after a change of government, and Baeten (2012)

and Sandberg’s (2014) argument that Västra Hamnen turned a post-

industrial landscape into a middle-class enclave mainly to meet economic

development goals. She also notes that the Swedish government’s efforts

of creating such demonstration projects has continued through the

planning of Norra Djurgårdsstaden (the Royal Seaport Area). Wangel

(2013) takes the critique of these districts further as she argues that not

only are they cities which were deliberately built to showcase

environmental technology and failing to meet the set standards, their

promotion as role models also works as a form of “lifestyle imperialism”.

In this promotion, supposedly efficient environmental technologies

provide means of becoming more sustainable without challenging more

fundamental concerns, such as the lifestyle of the inhabitants.

Following up on Hult (2013), Mejía-Dugand (2016) traces the continued

evolution of the SymbioCity concept by drawing on experiences from the

World Urban Forum 7 held in Medellin, Colombia, in April 2014. He

explores the strategies used to promote the SymbioCity “tool”, by

studying physical and non-physical message from the Swedish delegation

and its exhibition and by interviewing actors at the conference and from

the Medellin city administration. He notes (p. 75) that “it is clear that the

ultimate goal of this tool, i.e., the promotion of the export of eco-profiled

technology, has not changed—but the message has”. Taking a starting

point in the observation that the SymbioCity is for the most part trying

to sell technological solutions which due to their invisible or hidden

nature are difficult to see or comprehend, he argues that differences in

contextual and historical characteristics between the idealized future and

the target cities influence their willingness to adopt the promoted

solutions. By drawing on examples he argues that the concept, or at least

the message of it, has evolved to become more flexible and allow for

bottom-up considerations to enter the discourse. This partly means that

the message has improved its ability “to shift between cooperation and

CHAPTER SUMMARY

20

commercial interests, as well as between a people-centered and a

technology-centered approach” (p. 77). He nevertheless argues that Sida

and SKL International have functioned as door openers to environmental

technology suppliers in developing countries, taking advantage of locals

that have been trained by them and who can facilitate market entrances,

provide legitimacy and give access to distribution networks (Mejía-

Dugand, 2013, 2016).

Chapter Summary

In this chapter I have introduced previous research of relevance to the case study of the

Swedish Sustainable City concept. This includes research showing how transfer of

urban policies become depoliticized by being framed as techno-managerial. Not only

has North-South transfer of urban policies and practices a history of being understood

as non-political, but approaches built on consensus are also increasingly portrayed as

necessary to cope with the challenges of urban sustainability in the Global South. Critics

claim that this tends to draw attention away from concerns over global

developmentalism. Previous studies of Swedish expertise in development cooperation has

also problematized how expertise contributes to such depolitization. Historical

examples of Swedish development cooperation have shown motivations of engagement

have ranged between solidarity and commercial interests, where it has been argued that

these have at times been closely entangled. Sweden has however always emphasized that

aid should not be used to sell a Swedish model but rather that foreign aid can assist

the realization of the recipients’ visions for development. Studies on the export of

agricultural expertise have however shown that formulations of the problems to be

addressed have indeed taken a starting point in the existent Swedish knowledge base.

Research on the positioning of Sweden and Swedish cities as role models for urban

sustainability have tended to problematize the way sustainability is defined and

communicated. This includes criticism of Swedish demonstration cities aimed at

promoting environmental technology, how the Swedish model for urban sustainability

has been marketed abroad and how this model has been adapted for purposes of

development cooperation.

21

3 Theoretical Framing This chapter presents literature relevant to understanding why and how

the actor-network of Swedish urban sustainability

export to the Global South has emerged.

This includes literature on sustainability transitions, the methodology

of Actor-Network Theory and theory on policy mobility.

Finally, an overview is given of the concepts used

in this study and how they are applied.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

23

3.1 Socio-Technical Transitions Theory

Socio-technical transitions theory seeks to understand the co-evolution

of societies and technological systems (Murphy, 2015). In doing so, two

concepts are central: socio-technical regimes and niches. A socio-

technical regime is defined as “the coherent complex of scientific

knowledge, engineering practices, production process technologies,

product characteristics, skills and procedures, established user needs,

regulatory requirements, institutions and infrastructures” (Coenen et al.,

2012). As a concept, it shows that scientific knowledge, engineering

practices and technologies are socially embedded (Rip and Kemp, 1998),

which constrains incremental socio-technical change to happen along

established pathways (Markard et al., 2012). Sustainability transitions are

thus seen as shifts from what is considered an unsustainable socio-

technical regime towards a more sustainable one (Truffer and Coenen,

2012). Niches are conceptualized as spaces protected from the logic and

direction of the prevailing regime, allowing radical innovation to take

place, creating novel technologies which may eventually compete with

incumbent ones.

Two theoretical frameworks considered central to sustainability

transitions theory are those of Technological Innovation Systems (TIS)

and the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP). TIS emphasizes functions that

support the diffusion of new sustainability innovations across space and

time, and focuses on institutional and organizational changes necessary

for such innovations (Markard et al., 2012). This approach is criticized by

proponents of the MLP for its preoccupation with successful

technologies (Truffer and Coenen, 2012), which tries to explain

transitions as co-evolutionary processes between multiple levels. These

levels are incumbent socio-technical configurations (regimes), emerging

alternatives (niches), and developments or events in the system

environment (landscape) (Geels, 2002), as shown in Figure 1. Some have

SOCIO-TECHNICAL TRANSITIONS THEORY

24

suggested an integrated framework to account for both approaches

(Markard and Truffer, 2008), although others (Stirling, 2011) have

questioned whether the diverging ontological assumptions of the schools

allows such integration (Truffer and Coenen, 2012).

Figure 1 Socio-technical transitions as understood from the multi-level perspective (2005).

Two other central frameworks with more prescriptive approaches are

Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and Transitions Management (TM).

While SNM has focused on the role of niches, and how they can be

deliberately created and supported, TM has taken a larger view on how

transitions can be influenced in more sustainable directions. This has been

THEORETICAL FRAMING

25

done by drawing insights from complex systems theory, governance

literature and by further development through action research (Markard

et al., 2012). In relation to cities, urban transition labs have been suggested

as a way of adopting TM to the urban context (Nevens et al., 2013) and

similar concepts have been developed in the context of the Global South

(Anderson et al., 2013).

TM has however been criticized for its post-political tendencies. TM

suggests, as Kenis et al. (2016) argues, that sustainability transitions

requires new modes of governance in which transitions processes are

understood not in political but in market terms. It seeks consensus in

long-term coordination towards a common good over traditional

consensus model of negotiation between social interests. Its reliance on

such a deliberative conception of democracy (consensus through

dialogue) instead of aggregative (aggregating previously existing interests

of individuals and groups through elections or voting) fails to

acknowledge power relations, radical pluralism and the constitutive

potential in conflict. This view is also contrasted by Mouffe’s (2005)

advocacy of an agonistic conception of democracy in which conflict or

antagonism is recognized as inevitable and in which actors understand

their relations as political opposition. This new governance approach is

further criticized for its focus on privileged groups in the name of

bottom-up processes, which reinforces unequal distribution of power and

makes this distribution invisible. While there is room for alternative paths

to sustainability, their contestation is largely understood in the quasi-

market terms of competing niches. Being based on a market-model, it

also considers neutral the neoliberal political economy as a fundamental

landscape element. This, they argue, makes it difficult for “ordinary”

citizens both to acknowledge the political and finding ways of being

represented. A short quote summarizes their critique:


26

[The dominant conception of sustainability transitions is that of]

“radical techno-managerial and socio-cultural transformations,

organised within the horizons of a capitalist order that is beyond

dispute” (Swyngedouw, 2010, p. 219).

The Geography of Urban Sustainability Transitions

Albeit popular for studying sustainability transitions, the MLP has been

critiqued for a lack of scale, place and space for two key reasons. Firstly,

institutions governing regimes and niches are not properly related to

territorial contexts in sociotechnical transition theory, which makes it

unable to explain why transitions towards sustainability can proceed in

spatially uneven manners. Secondly, as the levels in the MLP are related

to the maturity of the socio-technological system (degree of structuration

of practices) rather than different geographical scales, it can be insensitive

towards the scale of developments affecting the transitions. A multi-scalar

approach has therefore been suggested, where levels and scale are two

dimensions for classifying a transition (Coenen et al., 2012), which has in

turn inspired what is called a second generation MLP, incorporating a

spatial scale along with time and structure (both seen as implicit in the

original levels). This second generation MLP explicitly theorizes

developments in and between regional, national and international

contexts. A consideration of space introduces a number of new

dimensions to the analysis of socio-technical systems (Raven et al., 2012):

distance (or proximity) as a factor in innovative activity; spatial differentiation,

from the observation that different places, however defined, exhibit

niches, regimes and landscapes with different characteristics; and reach,

the observation that ‘action at a distance’ operates in social systems across

scales and levels.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

27

As a response to the lack of sense of place and space in the MLP in

attempts to understand urban sustainability transitions, it has been

suggested that cities can be viewed as (although not necessarily always

functioning as) innovation niches for sustainability transitions at the larger

scale (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Wolfram, 2016). From that view, two

aspects of the MLP specific to cities necessary to consider have been

recognized: As the levels of the MLP are, as previously noted, not related

to geographical scales, one relevant aspect is that regarding the

“nestedness of regimes”, meaning that cities can shape and be shaped by

national [and arguably also international] transitions; a second

observation is that of the multiple levels of governance affecting the city,

enabling and necessitating consideration of the intentional and

unintentional influence of actors at national and supranational scales on

action at the city-scale (Hodson and Marvin, 2010).

Applying the MLP on urban sustainability transitions in turn necessitates

two considerations: firstly, the role of visions as reference points for

building of networks for, committing to, orienting actions towards and

persuasion of the desirability of the transition; secondly, the critical role

of systemic intermediaries, i.e. organizations “set-up to intervene in a variety

of ways in existing systems of producing and consuming resources”

(Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Regarding the role of visions of

sustainability, several papers have pointed to their contested and changing

nature (Meadowcroft, 2011; Garud and Gehman, 2012) and the necessity

to consider their framing and negotiation (Eames et al., 2006; Truffer and

Coenen, 2012). The role of systemic intermediaries and the capabilities

required for such has also been studied and elaborated in more detail

(Anderson et al., 2013; Hamann and April, 2013).

Others also recognizing the importance of actors and institutions at the

supranational scale have suggested adopting a dialectic view of global

networks with local nodes, allowing the dimensions of transitions to be

defined based on how actors themselves develop relationships over space


28

(Coenen et al., 2012). Such mapping of actors can also be done by

complementing the MLP with inspiration from Actor-Network Theory

(ANT) (Raven et al., 2012; Maassen, 2012), although it is worth noting

that the ontological consistency (i.e. multiple levels versus flat) of such a

combination has been disputed (Geels, 2011; Maassen, 2012).

Further examples of engagement with the supranational scale of

transitions include conceptualizations of leapfrogging of urban

infrastructures in relation to spatially conceived innovation systems (Binz

et al., 2012), and engagement with transition management (pointing

amongst other things towards the necessity of considering the role of

international development institutions) (Poustie et al., 2016).

Development aid interventions has also been given attention in relation

to the MLP through conceptualizations of donor programs as a form of

transnational linkage (Hansen and Nygaard, 2013). Work on relational

and territorial aspects on the global scale and their effect on urban

(energy) transitions in the Global South (Mans, 2014) seems hitherto

limited to a focus on business relations. As far as I am informed, no work

has yet considered the influence of development cooperation initiatives

at the supranational scale and their impact on urban sustainability niches

as conceived in the MLP.

The Politics and Power in Sustainability Transitions

Apart from geographical aspects of transitions, the need to consider social

processes and power relations has also been urged. Particularly, the MLP

has been criticized for its techno-deterministic and teleological approach,

and for focusing on elite actors in shaping transitions while insufficiently

acknowledging the challenge of pluralistic and inclusive governance of

transitions. This has inspired a complementing of the MLP with insights

from political ecology by identification of interrelated problems and

competing interventions, by consideration of a broader range of actors

and their knowledges and by exploring the impact of power relations on

transitions (Lawhon and Murphy, 2012). Others have joined in voicing

THEORETICAL FRAMING

29

the need to consider the agency of actors, their strategies and their

resources involved in shaping sustainability transitions (Farla et al., 2012).

To such ends, Murphy (2015) describes a relational “place-making”4

framework to reveal how actors construct places such as cities, with

claimed relevance for both TIS and MLP approaches and then

demonstrates how it can be applied to analyze the contested politics that

shape the prospects for sustainability transitions. Others (Kern, 2015)

have focused on the politics, agencies and structures in TIS. On the MLP

field, the politics of transitions has been given attention through work

focused on niche resistance (Geels, 2014) and critical niches (Smith et al.,

2016). Notable applications of the MLP drawing on global political

economy have considered economic power relations on the global scale

in the shaping of energy transitions in the Global South (Newell and

Phillips, 2016; Power et al., 2016). In the urban context the urban political

ecology of urban infrastructures has also been given attention (Monstadt,

2009). Nevertheless, the recent attention given to the urban context in the

MLP has yet to fill a gap in considering the politics of and the power

relations in international development initiatives.

4 Place-making is defined as “the process of reproducing, eliminating, and/or modifying the structures, identities, meanings, geographies, positionalities, and power relations associated with a given place” (Murphy, 2015), p. 84).

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY: MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC TOOLBOX

30

3.2 Actor-Network Theory:

Material-Semiotic Toolbox

Paying attention to the role of actors, ANT has in recent years gained

attention from MLP scholars (Maassen, 2012) and in relation to urban

planning (Doak and Karadimitriou, 2007; Farías and Bender, 2012;

Beauregard, 2012; Rydin, 2013; Rapoport and Hult, 2017). Some

ingredients in an ANT account includes (Law, 2008, p. 146):

• semiotic relationality - networks whose elements define and

shape one another,

• materiality - stuff is there aplenty, not just “the social”,

• heterogeneity - there are different kinds of actors, human

(“actors”) and otherwise (“actants”),

• process and its precariousness - all elements need to play their

part moment by moment or it all comes unstuck, and

• attention given to:

o power as an effect - it is a function of network

configuration and in particular the creation of immutable

mobiles, and

o space and to scale - how it is that networks extend

themselves and translate distant actors.

Although emphasis is put on the precariousness of processes, there is also

an acknowledgement of how the arrangement of relations into orders and

hierarchies which may render a network (or parts of one) to be more

provisional or stabilized (Rydin, 2013).

THEORETICAL FRAMING

31

ANT should be understood not as a theory as much as a toolkit (Law,

2008, pp. 141–142). This toolkit is based on three methodological

principles (Callon, 1984):

• agnosticism – abandoning a priori assumptions of the nature of

networks,

• generalized symmetry – using a single explanatory frame,

regardless of actor, and

• free association – abandoning any distinction between natural

and social phenomenon.

In using this toolkit, the network in ANT is not something waiting to be

discovered but is rather what is defined by tracing the agencies of actors

(Latour, 2005). An ANT account is thus an attempt of understanding the

dynamic ways in which relationships between actors are established,

negotiated and maintained (Rydin, 2013). An actor is defined here as “any

element which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent upon itself

and translates their will in to a language of its own” (Callon and Latour, 1981, p.

286). In operationalizing ANT for technology studies, actor-networks can

be analyzed by considering four different traits (Hallström, 2003, p. 52):

content, i.e. actors, actants and specifically those constituting obligatory

passage points; interests of the actors, the power resources enabling the

enactment of a (part of a) network and its durability.

A central concept in tracing a network is translation, which refers to the

process of establishing actants’ identities and the conditions of their

interactions as well as the characterization of their representations

(Crawford, 2005). Translation can, in the vocabulary of ANT, be broken

down into problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization.

Problematization refers to the framing of the problem, and may include

definition of obligatory passage points (Callon, 1984). Obligatory passage

points, i.e. points between the translated and the translation, require

actors to gather around the dominant framing and then engage in

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY: MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC TOOLBOX

32

negotiations within the context of the framing (Callon, 1986). A problem

definition is furthermore inseparable from the actor who makes it and

there is always a target group (Callon, 1980, pp. 209–210).

The definition of the problem is followed by the actor getting other actors

interested in the problem definition. Interessement thus refers to the

process by which actants are locked into proposed roles by accepting the

problem definition and may include the accepting of a specific actant as

focal in the definition of the obligatory passage point. If the

interessement is successful the interested actors are enrolled, meaning

that they become involved in the network relationship on specific terms.

If the enrollment then results in active support, the actor has mobilized

an actor-network (Callon, 1986; Rydin, 2013). Mobilization thus refers to

the representation of the network by a spokesperson, i.e, the person

speaking on behalf of an actant or actor. The process of mobilization may

then include what is called black-boxing (Rodger et al., 2009), referring to

the stabilizing and immunizing of translations against critique (Latour,

2005). Such immunizing can for instance be part of establishing “good”

practices which may be applied in a multitude of locations (Rydin, 2013).

ANT further distinguishes between intermediators and mediators, where

intermediators only transfer the agency of other entities, thus extending

the network without translation, while mediators multiply difference and

thus interfere with the translations (Latour, 2005). Trying thus to

understand translations, recognizing the multiplicity of actor-networks is

essential (Law, 2008), i.e. there is not one actor-network identical to all

the actors but several contingent on how agency is being felt and exerted

among them.

For a project to be successful, it requires a global network which lends it

resources and a space of negotiation, as well as a local network within that

space which carries out the project and feeds the results back in to the

global network. The actor who manages to establish itself between these

networks as an obligatory passage point gains control over the project,

THEORETICAL FRAMING

33

which is understood as required for its success. Keeping to the

precariousness of processes, ANT nevertheless acknowledges that

translations may indeed fail, and obligatory passage points may vanish

(Callon, 1986).

Networks further depend on what circulates in them, which can also be

referred to as tokens or quasi-objects (Latour, 1996, p. 379). What circulates

is similarly to a scientific text defined by “the competence it is endowed with, the

trials it undergoes, the performances it is allowed to display, the association it is made

to bear upon, the sanctions it receives, the background in which it is circulating etc”

(Latour, 1996, p. 378), all of which brings attention to the agency of texts.

Faithful to the principle of the precariousness of processes yet again, the

persistence in time and space of what circulates (and thus constituting the

network), i.e. its “isotopy” or “immutability” cannot be found in any essence

but is a result of narrative programs and paths (Latour, 1996). A critique

of ANT is that it leaves no room for “Otherness” and allows nothing to

stand outside the network established in an account (Hetherington and

Law, 2000). The notion of absence-presence (Callon and Law, 2004) can

however be a way of considering what is absent present in a network and

what constitutes a network without being present (Hult, 2013).

In seeking to trace such circulations it is thus also important to consider

the interpretative flexibility of what circulates, i.e. the degree to which a token

can be differently interpreted among actors in the network (Callon et al.,

1992, p. 24). In relation to technology transfer, De Laet and Mol (2000)

provides an account of the role of mutability or “fluidity” for a technology

to be successful in its contexts of application. By departure from the B-

type bush pump, providing water to rural sites in Zimbabwe, they

demonstrate three forms of fluidity, namely the shifting boundaries of the

solution, a flexible working order and a compliant maker. The utility of these

concepts has been further demonstrated in a study of the Swedish nuclear

waste management program by Elam and Sundqvist (2011). They also

argue that while such fluidity may in the case of the bush pump render it

POLICY MOBILITY THEORY: CIRCULATION OF EXPERTISE

34

admirable or even “lovable”5, it should in the case of the nuclear waste

issue be looked at with suspicion as a means of power with the ability of

maintaining the control of the nuclear industry.

In relation to sustainability transitions theory, ANT challenges the

Giddensian notion of structuration which constitutes the foundation of

the levels in the Multi-Level Perspective and brings attention to how the

process of transitioning is interpreted by the actors themselves. Assuming

thus instead a relational view of niches and regimes, necessitates

consideration of their novelty and obduracy respectively, which in turn does

away with niche-variations or regime-selections being a priori ascribed to

particular actors. Empirical studies have found obduracy in systemic lock-

out, points of im-passage and disconnected practices (Maassen, 2012).

3.3 Policy Mobility Theory: Circulation of Expertise

How knowledge or expertise regarding urban policy is circulated,

mediated and applied is the core of work on urban mobility (McCann,

2011; Temenos and McCann, 2012). Such studies of interest to this work

has considered North-South interurban partnerships by starting from

British municipal internationalism (Clarke, 2012b), the role of

transnational planners in the post-colonial context (Ward et al., 2010), and

the local reception of circulating models for sustainability planning

(Temenos and McCann, 2012). Temenos and McCann (2012) study how

imported models of sustainability draw attention to certain problem

definitions and promote certain types of policy solutions. They study the

local politics of these policies and the processes in which the models are

5 The “love” of technology is introduced in Latour and Porter (1996) as the lacking factor leading to the failure of the French automated tram “Aramis”. For De Laet and Mol (2000), the term is not used normatively to deem a technology sound or not, but descriptively as a means of denoting the attraction it exercises. See also Wormbs’ (2003, pp. 186–194, 217–220) account of the love of experimental satellites in the Nordic countries.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

35

learned within the local. They describe the process of such learning by

drawing on McFarlane’s (2011) distinction of three interrelated ongoing

processes: “translation” – actors’ mediation of relationships and

knowledges, “coordination” – the use of structures and objects to organize

discussions about policies, and the “education of attention” by hands-on

training.

Rapoport and Hult (2017) examine the role of global engineering and

architecture firms, which they refer to using the term Global Intelligence

Corps (GIC), such as the Swedish firm SWECO (which was involved in

developing the SymbioCity Approach) and their role in circulation of

sustainable urbanism. They suggest that the GIC circulate and promote a

model of urban sustainability as a consistent “menu of options” to choose

from, which is underpinned by the premise of sustainable urbanism and

economic growth being complementary objectives6. Its procedural

elements consist of an advocacy for an integrated, multi-disciplinary

approach, drawing on expertise of professionals from several disciplines

(Rapoport and Hult, 2017). The question remains to be answered, they

note, of how this model can be expanded to incorporate a wider range of

theories and approaches for creating change. Hult (2017) further points

to the necessity of examining the role of national government in

promoting urban sustainable development and how responsibility for

social equity and consumption can be taken into account in urban

planning practice.

6 While Rapoport and Hult are concerned with the role of the GIC in the Chinese market, a similar remark has been made regarding the role of such firms in promoting “fantasy designs” for African cities (Watson and Babatunde, 2013).

APPLIED ANALYTICAL APPROACH AND CONCEPTS

36

3.4 Applied Analytical Approach and Concepts

Inspired by the urge from geographers to allow the dimensions of

sustainability transitions to be defined based on how actors themselves

develop relationships over space (Coenen et al., 2012), I follow Maassen

(2012) by bringing sustainability transition theory into conversation with

actor-network theory in this work. I further follow Wormbs (2003) in

considering ANT useful as an approach to the analysis since “it takes

complexity and uncertainty into consideration, because it avoids a priori

divisions and distinctions, and because it usefully stresses how the relation

between content and context is continually formed and changed”. Such a

framework facilitates situating the SymbioCity and its proposition in both

the global and the urban context. It also helps in considering the

contestation (explicit and implicit) of sustainability transitions, as the

attentiveness of ANT with the precariousness of processes render it

particularly suitable for studying controversies and societal shifts (Rydin,

2013). I thus use ANT as an approach to try to bypass explanatory biases

from theory on policy mobility and socio-technical transitions.

In chapter 6 I trace the actor-network of Swedish export of urban

sustainability using the ANT-conception of translation, by paying attention

to the processes of problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization,

paying particular attention to the establishment of obligatory passage points

between the global and the local networks. The concept of tokens is used to

understand what has been circulated in the actor-network, including a

story of Swedish environmental history and the approach to urban

sustainability. Doing so, I use the term black-boxing to describe how the

translations of Swedish urban sustainability have been immunized against

critique.

In chapter 7.1 I explore how the concept of Swedish urban sustainability

has evolved and how mutable or fluid it has been in that process. In doing

so, the notion of multiplicity is used to emphasize the multiple ways in

which the network has extended itself. The notion of interpretative flexibility

THEORETICAL FRAMING

37

is then useful for understanding how Swedish sustainability has been

understood differently among different actors. The fluidity of the

SymbioCity concept is discussed by considering qualities which have

previously been shown to provide fluidity, namely shifting boundaries of the

solution, a flexible working order and a compliant maker (de Laet and Mol,

2000; Elam and Sundqvist, 2011). I make use of the terms disconnected

practices and points of im-passage to describe the co-evolution of the multiple

translations in the network. I also use the notion of stability in referring to

durable elements in the network.

In chapter 7.2 I structure the discussion of how the approach has been

promoted to low-income cities in the Global South according to the

previously observed pattern in North-South urban policy mobility

(chapter 3.3), namely how the approach has been adopted for travel and how

the recipients have been discursively prepared to receive it. In the same

chapter I also discuss some geographical aspects of this process, drawn

from the second-generation multi-level perspective, namely distance

between Sweden and the recipient cities; if and how the spaces of novelty

(i.e. niches) have been understood to be different (spatial differentiation) and

how the actor-network allowed Swedish actors to reach the recipients and

perform action at a distance.

In chapter 7.3 I try to understand how Swedish urban sustainability has

been received and use the concepts of translation, coordination and education

of attention to do so. The notions of mediation and intermediations are then

useful in pinning out the details of the translation. I also use the notion

of absence-presence (Callon and Law, 2004) in considering what helps to

constitute the network without being present (Hult, 2013). In discussing

the process of coordination, I also make use of the notion of relational

place-making to describe how relations across distances have shaped how

places are made.

In chapter 7.4 I provide an overview of the actor-network through a

summary of their translations and four different traits in them (Hallström,

CHAPTER SUMMARY

38

2003, p. 52): their content, i.e. actors, actants and specifically those

constituting obligatory passage points; the interests of their actors, their

power resources enabling the enactment of (parts of) the network and their

durability. In the concluding chapter (8.2), I bring my findings from the

actor-network theory approach in to further dialogue with sustainability

transitions theory by considering how novelty and obduracy have been

understood among the actors.

Chapter Summary

This chapter has presented theory relevant in exploring the export of Swedish urban

sustainability. Socio-technical transitions theory (STT) seeks to understand the co-

evolution of societies and technological systems, whereby sustainability transitions are

understood as shifts towards more sustainable socio-technical configurations. The field

includes explanatory frameworks such as the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), as well

as more prescriptive ones, such as Transitions Management (TM). The MLP has,

despite its popularity, been criticized for its lack of political and geographical

considerations. TM on the other hand, which also bears resemblance to the SymbioCity

concept, has been criticized for its depoliticized approach to sustainability. Actor-

Network Theory (ANT) provides a method and language for tracing how actors build

coalitions or actor-networks to achieve their objectives, without starting in explanatory

frameworks such as the MLP. In ANT, agency is ascribed to both humans and non-

humans, which clarifies how objects transfer messages and power in relation to urban

sustainability. Policy mobility theory (PMT) is concerned with precisely how knowledge

or expertise regarding urban policy is circulated, mediated and applied across various

contexts. In recent years, PMT has paid increased attention to how such policy mobility

carries with it and reinforces a depoliticized view of sustainability. The chapter was

concluded with a presentation of the applied analytical approach. The effort of Swedish

actors to contributing to urban sustainability in the Global South is traced by drawing

on ANT. PMT is used to explain how the transfer and translation of policies between

cities takes focus away from their contested nature. Concepts are then drawn from STT

to discuss what this specifically means in transitioning towards sustainability.

39

4 Method This chapter motivates the method chosen to gather empirical data

necessary to address the question of why and how the Swedish actor-

network of urban sustainability export to the Global South has emerged.

The method consists of a case study informed by a review of written

materials and semi-structured interviews with some of its actors.

The chapter also provides a critical discussion of the source material and

briefly describes the evolution of the research process.

METHOD

41

4.1 Research Approach

The purpose of this study is to explore how Swedish actors have tried to

contribute to urban sustainability in cities in the Global South and how

these efforts have impacted its recipients. This topic is (as motivated in

chapter 1) understudied and needs to be explored both for theoretical and

practical reasons, which makes a qualitative research approach suitable.

Such an approach provides means for exploring and understanding the

meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem, in

this case that of urban sustainability. A qualitative approach is especially

useful for subjects where the important variables are not known

beforehand (Creswell, 2013).

Case Study of the SymbioCity Concept

To explore why and how Swedish actors have sought to contribute to

urban sustainability in cities in the Global South, I take a starting point in

the SymbioCity concept, as it has been central to the export of Swedish

urban sustainability. As I am interested in an in-depth understanding of

the interplay in the actor-network, I choose a case study approach as it

provides the opportunity of a feasible, yet potentially detailed and deep

scrutiny of actors (Yin, 2013). It is worth noting that the focus on Swedish

actors and their strategies limits the statistical generalizability of the case

study. However, in its capacity of a single case, it serves as an inductive

basis for critical engagement with established theories on sustainability

transitions (as outlined in chapter 3.1) (Yin, 2013), an thus provides some

analytical generalizability. SymbioCity is chosen as a case of North-South

transfer of expertise and particularly one with a consensual approach

bearing resemblance to approaches towards sustainability from literature

and practice (see chapters 2 and 3). I take SymbioCity as a concept of

urban sustainability as unit of analysis as that facilitates foregrounding the

actors, relations and circulations of sustainability.

DATA COLLECTION

42

4.2 Data Collection

Data for the case study is collected through a review of written materials

complemented with semi-structured interviews, as further outlined

below.

Review of Written Material

A starting point of the case study is taken in written materials and

documentation of the SymbioCity concept, including documentation of

the approach (Andersson et al., 2014, 2013; Ranhagen and Groth, 2012)

and an evaluation of its implementation (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

Documentation of decisions concerning the concept retrieved from Sida,

listed in Table 1 serves as a cross-reference to validate information from

the interviews.

Semi-Structured Interviews

To complement the written materials available on the SymbioCity

Approach and to consider the perspectives of the involved and affected

actors, interviews are held with actors that are found relevant in the

scoping phase of the case study and as the actor-network is traced. While

a case study based on interviews comes with risks of subjectivity which

could be argued to impede its validity, ANT stresses that actor-networks

must be understood according to how actors themselves perceive agency

(Latour, 2005). Semi-structured interviews are considered appropriate

both for the explorative purpose of this work, and for recording a wide

range of considerations among the actors including their interests,

resources and strategies in engaging in the actor-network. Consulted

informants are listed in Table 2. As can be noted, they include the central

actors in the Swedish actor-network of urban sustainability.

METHOD

43

Table 1Reviewed documentation concerning SymbioCity retrieved from Sida

Year Documents (№)

2006 038415, 038419

2007 025554, 026967, 029707, 057500

2008 014101, 028752

2009 001001, 026188, 033829

2013 001234, 000369

Table 2 List of consulted informants

Informant Organization/Affiliation Function/Title Date of Interview

Lena Falcón SKL International SymbioCity Project leader

2017-02-16 2017-04-05*

Thomas Melin Sida Responsible for SymbioCity

2017-02-22

Mats Jarnhammar SKL International SymbioCity Urban advisor

2017-03-06*

Håkan Dahlfors Business Sweden (formerly)

Former Vice President

2017-03-03

Ulf Ranhagen KTH School of Architecture, SWECO

Author of the approach

2017-03-13

Cecilia Schartau Business Sweden Responsible for SymbioCity

2017-03-31

Gustaf Asplund SKL International Consultant 2017-04-20*

*Telephone interviews

RESEARCH QUALITY

44

4.3 Research Quality

The quality of research can be described in terms of its reliability and

validity. In this section I also provide a critique of my source material.

Reliability

Reliability traditionally refers to the extent to which an experiment can be

repeated with the same outcome. In the case of social science research

based on qualitative approaches, the subject of investigation is far too

complex for this to be possible. Reliability then becomes a matter of

ensuring that research procedures are transparently presented to the

reader. Here I have omitted more specific descriptions of research

procedures such as interview guides since the semi-structured approach

often proceeded organically without considerable reference to the guides.

I have however tried to specify analyzed documents and consulted

informants (section 4.2) and to describe the evolution of the research

process (section 4.4).

Validity

Internal validity refers to how well the research does what it is meant to

do. I have strived for such validity by motivating my methodological

choices in relation to my purpose and research question. In qualitative

research, validity refers to ensuring the accuracy of the findings (Creswell,

2013), which I discuss below. External validity on the other hand refers

to the generalizability of the empirical results to the phenomenon in

general. In this study, the external validity is largely determined by the

choice of case study (see section 4.1).

METHOD

45

Source Criticism

In terms of the quality of sources, theory is obtained from published peer-

reviewed journals and books, and is as far as possible discussed and used

critically (see section 3). While interviews may yield information which is

representative only to the informant, historical data is triangulated with

written materials and government documentation. As argued in section

4.1, the informants’ subjective accounts are valuable to the understanding

of agency in the actor-network. To ensure further validity of the interview

material, follow-up questions were used to validate interpretations of the

information (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2015).

4.4 Research Process

In performing the case study, I have used an abductive approach,

alternating continuously between studying literature and empirical

investigation, hermeneutically deepening the understanding of the case

and informing the further inquiry. Interviews have been made

continuously, starting with explorative interviews followed by more

detailed follow-ups. Whereas the initial theoretical starting point was

taken in sustainability transitions theory, the approach soon shifted

towards an actor-network approach, motivated by the contributions from

geography (see chapter 3.1 and chapter 3.4). Policy mobility theory then

provided a complementary explanatory framework in understanding the

tracing of the networks extension. The research process was guided by

the following questions: What motives have the different actors in the

export of Swedish urban sustainability had?; What resources were

mobilized in networking Swedish urban sustainability?; How has Swedish

urban sustainability been circulated and related to its contexts of

application?; What activities were enabled/disabled by how the actor-

network was configured and stabilized?; and How has the performance

and circulation of Swedish urban sustainability impacted its recipients?.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

46

Chapter Summary

This chapter has introduced the method chosen to gather empirical material. A

qualitative case study is made of the Swedish SymbioCity concept. Data is gathered

through review of written materials and semi-structured interviews with actors in the

case study. While the generalizability of a case study is limited, it’s particularity serves

as a basis for discussing both theory and practice. Reliability is strived for through a

transparency in choice and execution of the method. Validity is strived for through

triangulation of data sources.

47

5 Introduction to the SymbioCity Approach

This chapter introduces the current SymbioCity Approach

to urban sustainability, its objectives and its working procedures.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMBIOCITY APPROACH

49

5.1 SymbioCity as a Conceptual Framework

The SymbioCity Approach is meant to provide an overview of the issues,

linkages, interfaces and synergies between the various systems, fields and

functions pertaining to sustainable urban development. The objectives of

the SymbioCity Approach in its current form are to (Ranhagen and

Groth, 2012):

• encourage and support multidisciplinary cooperation among

stakeholders and an integrated approach

• contribute to capacity building by mutual sharing of knowledge

and experience, primarily at local government level

• serve as a basis for dialogue and cooperation between

stakeholders at local level, but including regional and national

institutions

• guide urban sustainability reviews at different levels, using a

combined multidisciplinary and sector approach

• contribute to city-wide strategies for improvement of urban

areas, including all dimensions of sustainability (Figure 3)

• help cities and towns to plan practical and integrated system

solutions for sustainable urban development

An illustration of its conceptual framework is provided in Figure 2. The

framework has three core areas: the conceptual model is meant to help

define sustainability in the local context by showing relationships between

the dimensions of sustainability and links to institutional aspects and

urban systems, helping to identify synergies; the institutional framework

provides a foundation for analysis of the institutional setting of

sustainability reviews or strategy development, which is seen as central for

promoting the concepts, ideas, strategies and solutions; urban systems

focuses on the interfaces and synergies of technical, environmental, socio-

cultural and economic systems.

SYMBIOCITY AS A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

50

Figure 2 Conceptual framework of the SymbioCity Approach. Source: Ranhagen and Groth (2012).

Figure 3 Aspects of sustainability in the SymbioCity Approach. Source: Ranhagen and Groth (2012)

INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMBIOCITY APPROACH

51

5.2 Working Procedure in the Approach

The working procedure of the Approach in practice consist of following

steps (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012; Andersson et al., 2013):

1. Defining and organizing the planning or review process

a. Involving stakeholders, as suggested by Figure 4.

b. Developing the process and structures

c. Planning the process

2. Diagnosing the current situation

a. Integration of systems and identifying synergies

b. Specifying objectives, indicators and targets including the

setting of long-term objectives

3. Developing alternative proposals

a. Considering a variety of solutions to a problem

b. Describing alternative scenarios

4. Analyzing impacts (social, environmental and economic)

5. Developing a strategy for implementation and follow-up

The process is guided by a facilitator and typically organized in a working

group, connected to a steering committee and stakeholder groups for

national policy makers and civil society respectively (Falcón, pers. comm.,

2017a; Ranhagen and Groth, 2012). The SymbioCity Approach is also

promoted through training courses on sustainable urban planning,

initiated and co-financed by SKL International. One of these courses is

part of Sida’s International Training Program (ITP) and one is carried out

by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A

specific course book, titled “Developing Sustainable Cities in Sweden”

(Andersson et al., 2011) was developed as a complement for the ITP

(Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

CHAPTER SUMMARY

52

Figure 4 Stakeholder involvement as suggested by the approach. Source: Andersson et al. (2014)

Chapter Summary

The SymbioCity Approach is meant to provide an overview of issues, linkages,

interfaces and synergies between the various systems, fields and functions pertaining to

sustainable urban development. The framework links a conceptual model, with an

institutional framework and urban systems. The working procedure consists of 1)

Defining and organizing the planning or review process; 2) Diagnosing the current

situation; 3) Developing alternative proposals; 4) Analyzing impacts and 5)

Developing a strategy for implementation and follow-up.

53

6 Three Phases of the Actor-Networking

This chapter introduces the actor-network exporting

Swedish urban sustainability by providing a historical account

chronologically presented in what can be understood as three phases.

The first phase concerns the inception of the Swedish Sustainable City concept.

The second treats the adaption of the concept to development cooperation.

The third deals with the transfer of the responsibility of the application

of the concept to development cooperation from Sida to SKL International.

The chapter is concluded with an overview of documents describing the

SymbioCity concept and a selection of events and periods in its development.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

54

THREE PHASES OF THE ACTOR-NETWORKING

55

6.1 Exporting Environmental Technology

through Urban Planning

This chapter presents the first phase of the actor-networking of Swedish urban

sustainability, focused on exporting environmental technology. I explore its

commercially oriented origin and evolution and specifically how Swedish urban

sustainability was conceptualized to market Swedish environmental technology.

Identifying Urban Planning as a Door-Opener

for Environmental Technology

In 2001, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the technology

consultancy firm SWECO were invited to compete in a competition to

plan a new town as part of the Shanghai One City Nine Towns Plan

drawing inspiration from other countries. SWECO decided to compete

and eventually won with the proposal which would become the Luodian

Swedish New Town (see Ranhagen (2014)), which drew attention from

the media and in extension the government. The government were at the

time interested in the possibility of connecting urban planning with

environmental and energy technology and got in contact with Ulf

Ranhagen through SWECO’s Head of Markets. Ranhagen was

consequently commissioned in his position at SWECO to author a

platform which brought together environmental technology and urban

sustainability (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). The resulting Sustainable

City concept (Ranhagen et al., 2002), was developed on behalf of the

Swedish government via the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry

of the Environment, and of the Swedish environmental technology

industry via the Swedish Trade Council. The concept was also seen as a

way to meet a perceived need of communicating Swedish urban

sustainability in international arenas. When presented at the 2002 World

Summit of Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the concept served

as a response to an identified need for holistic planning and governance

EXPORTING ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY THROUGH URBAN PLANNING

56

of city development and as a niche for Sweden at the summit, which

would encourage public and private sector to demonstrate their

cooperation (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012; Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

Crafting Swedish Urban Sustainability from and for

Commercial Partnerships

The approach to urban sustainability developed by Ranhagen was

founded on experiences which are partly idealized and partly research

based, and can be understood as a model or vision rather than a

description of the Swedish experience. The experiences incorporated

included those gathered in a program commissioned by the Swedish

Energy Agency on sustainable municipalities (see Ranhagen (2011))

(Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). It seems as Ranhagen’s experience and

competency in urban planning, and the attention which the Luodian New

Town gave rise to, lent him the legitimacy needed for being

commissioned by the government. According to its author the

“Swedishness” of the approach is threefold (Ranhagen, pers. comm.,

2017):

• the starting point in a decentralized political structure,

• the transparency of processes and inclusion of stakeholders, and

• the ambition of a holistic and cross-sectoral approach allowing

for synergies to be identified.

These elements were repeated in several interviews, indicating a shared

view of the “Swedishness” of the concept.

It is worth noting the origins of the approach, especially its foundation in

the engineering consultancy firm SWECO. As shown by Hult (Hult,

2015) and Rapoport and Hult (2017), such firms, which they refer to as

part of a Global Intelligence Corps (GIC), package and circulate certain

models of urban sustainability (see also chapter 3.3), such as the

SymbioCity concept, thereby shaping norms regarding what constitutes


57

urban sustainability. Interestingly, they investigate particularly the

engagement of Swedish firms such as SWECO and Tengbom architects

in Chinese eco-city projects, which constituted the inception point of the

Sustainable City concept. While the resulting plans are shown to have had

little impact on the ground, they nevertheless reinforce a view in which

sustainable urbanism and economic growth are complementary

objectives.

Selling Environmental Technology through the Story of Decoupling

To promote the Swedish approach to urban sustainability, the trade

council mobilized a narrative of Swedish environmental history which

described how Sweden has made a successful turn from being troubled

by environmental issues to establishing itself as a frontrunner in

environmental issues. This was very much a result of searching for a story

which could be accepted by all the stakeholders in the environmental

technology industry and which could be applied in a wide variety of

contexts, such as exhibitions, embassy events and delegation trips, to

create interest among potential buyers. Central to the story is a graph

(presented in Figure 5) showing how Sweden has managed to decouple

its economic growth from its emissions of carbon dioxide (Dahlfors, pers.

comm., 2017; Schartau, pers. comm., 2017).

Indeed, Hult (2013) notes that the story depends on Swedish nuclear

power being “absent-present” (Callon and Law, 2004) in the network,

allowing a translation of Swedish urban sustainability based on

environmental technology to be black-boxed. The story further depends

on a production perspective of emissions, and can, if viewed from a

consumption perspective be disclosed as a myth (Hult, 2013). There was

however a recognition that the Swedish development is not so much a

result of technological solutions, but is rather understood to be a result

of its cross-sectoral processes (Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017).

EXPORTING ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY THROUGH URBAN PLANNING

58

Figure 5 The SymbioCity graph, illustrating the Swedish experience of decoupling economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. Source: Hult (2013).

Establishing the SymbioCity Concept as Unique

to Sell Swedish Environmental Technology

When the decoupling narrative had been settled upon, the trade council

received means from the government for developing marketing materials

(Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). Business Sweden then hired a

communication firm to simplify the approach for communicative

purposes, although it was also seen as compromising some of its depth

(Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). The concept was also renamed

SymbioCity as a way of protecting it as a trademark and to distinguish it

from other concepts (Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). This indicates that

the uniqueness of the concept (although not explicitly its “Swedishness”)

was emphasized as a means of marketing Swedish environmental

technology. Together with the story of Swedish environmental history

and the slogan “Sustainability by Sweden”, the Swedishness of the

concept seems to have been considered important for framing Swedish

environmental technology as desirable.


59

SymbioCity as an Obligatory Passage Point in the

Environmental Technology Network

Although the Swedish trade council has aimed at promoting Swedish

environmental technology, SymbioCity was seen not as emphasizing

technological solutions per se but rather a cross-sectoral approach

enabling synergies between urban infrastructural systems. The

SymbioCity concept has thus rather been seen as a door opener for the

promotion of Swedish environmental technology. The approach was

nevertheless considered critical in framing Swedish solutions as relevant,

as single sector or “silo” approaches might render Swedish solutions to

be overlooked. Such a framing would then facilitate the work of Swedish

environmental technology companies in selling their technology

(Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). Ensuring such a framing of urban

sustainability can be understood as the SymbioCity concept being

established as an obligatory passage point in the actor-network of Swedish

environmental technology export. This would mean that local networks

drawing resources for urban sustainability from the global network of

Swedish expertise were primed for marketing of Swedish environmental

technology. The many reported applications of the SymbioCity concept

for communicating Swedish urban sustainability (Dahlfors, pers. comm.,

2017), points to the establishing of such a passage point as successful.

In this regard, Swedish environmental technology shows features similar

to those of scripts, which “define a framework of action together with the

actors and the space in which they are supposed to act” (Akrich, 1992,

pp. 207–208), by motivating the export of cross-sectoral approaches to

urban issues. Apart from seeking to influence at policy level, Business

Sweden also saw a need to develop several offers to meet the expectation

of “selling something”. Such offers were based on thematic areas such as

airports or urban transport (Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). This seems

partly to have been a compromise with need of cross-sectoral

partnerships, necessary to fit the available communication channels.

ADDING DEVELOPMENT EXPERTISE TO THE SUSTAINABLE CITY CONCEPT

60

6.2 Adding Development Expertise to the

Sustainable City Concept

This chapter presents what can be called the second phase of the actor-networking of

Swedish urban sustainability, in which the adaption of the concept to application in

development cooperation was initiated. In this phase Sida identified a need for an

integrated approach to urban planning, such as the Sustainable City concept, in low-

income countries. This led to application of the approach to two pilot cities and the

development of a manual.

Identifying a Need for a New Urban Planning Approach

in Low-Income Countries

Around 4-5 years after its inception, the Swedish international

development agency, Sida, became interested in the Sustainable City

concept (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017) and wanted to see whether it

could be applied to development cooperation. Sida had at an early stage

recognized the role which cities would need to play in pursuing

sustainable development and saw a possibility of adapting the Sustainable

City concept by adding development competence to it (Melin, pers.

comm., 2017).

“With the enormous scale of urban growth especially in some

areas of Asia and Africa the need for a more holistic planning

and governance of city development, including environmental

systems solutions, becomes obvious. There is also an urgent need

for improved management and operation of municipal

environmental infrastructure” (Sida, 2006).

The quote from the project proposal points to the challenges posed by

urban growth necessitating a holistic approach to cities and also indicates

a continuity in the attention to environmental technology and

infrastructure. Sweden’s early experience of engaging with the

sustainability of cities, in part due to experience of urban development


61

based on decentralized regulation and in part on municipal taxation, was

considered relevant in assisting such approaches (Melin, pers. comm.,

2017). An important factor behind the initiative was the identified

competence base within municipalities as well as other public authorities,

institutes, universities and networks (Sida, 2006).

Adapting the Approach to Low-Income Contexts

To adapt the Sustainable City concept to low-income contexts, Sida

commisioned Ulf Ranhagen to author a set of guidelines, resulting in “The

Sustainable City Approach Manual for Support to Environmentally Sustainable

Urban Development in Developing Countries”. The first Sustainable City

concept was developed by Ulf Ranhagen with a reference group of four,

including advisors from SWECO, the Swedish environmental research

institute IVL, and another consultancy firm, WSP. Apart from his own

research and experience from working with Swedish municipalities, the

manual also incorporated knowledge from consultants with experience of

the developing context (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017).

To test the applicability of the approach, two pilot projects were carried

out, one in Visakhapatnam in India and one in Skopje, Macedonia, during

2008-2009. According to Mats Jarnhammar (2017), the political view

which Sida encountered in this phase held that people should be

prevented from moving to the cities by focusing on rural development.

They therefore took upon them to convince the politicians that

urbanization is inevitable, that everyone is entitled access to the city and

that planning needs to include those living in informal areas (Gordan,

2017).

According to Melin (2017), there are many similar handbooks available

and which one is used is not critical. This view is shared in the evaluation

which notes the similarity of the approach to thinking in other national

and international institutions. It was however seen as unique in being a

process-oriented urban planning instrument which can fit into existing

ADDING DEVELOPMENT EXPERTISE TO THE SUSTAINABLE CITY CONCEPT

62

planning structures and links a conceptual model with working

procedures and best practices (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014). Melin

(2017) also stressed that other handbooks have often been developed

with an ideal city in mind, and that there is a lack of visions adapted to

poor cities (Melin, pers. comm., 2017). The concept is currently viewed

as a means of assisting countries in pursuing the New Urban Agenda and

Agenda 2030 (Melin, pers. comm., 2017).

Forming a Common Concept of Swedish Urban Sustainability

In 2007, the Swedish Trade Council (now Business Sweden) launched the

SymbioCity platform as an effort to rejuvenate and further specialize the

concept for marketing purposes. The Sustainable city concept was

eventually integrated into the SymbioCity initiative to form an all-

encompassing concept and communication platform for Swedish actors

involved in urban development (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014; Hult,

2013). The sharing arenas such as conferences and having a common

foundation was though likely to have motivated a common platform

(Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017).


63

6.3 Building and Networking Municipal Expertise

This chapter presents what can be called the third phase of the actor-networking of

Swedish urban sustainability, in which the application of the approach to urban

planning in low-income countries was transferred from Sida to SKL International.

Transferring the SymbioCity Concept to SKL International

As Sida realized that it was politically unviable to host the concept as its

own with the withdrawal of Sida’s urban unit, they choose between

handing it over to either Boverket (the Swedish national board of

housing), KTH Royal Institute of Technology or SKL (the Swedish

Association Local Authorities and Regions (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014;

Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). Upon considering the important role of

the decentralized municipal planning monopoly as a component of

Swedish planning, the choice fell on SKL in 2009 (Ranhagen, pers.

comm., 2017). In 2010 SKL was consequently assigned the mission to

develop the concept further, which in turn assigned it to the subsidiary

corporation SKL International (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

Transferring the responsibility of the approach to SKL and SKL

International meant accessing the country-spanning network of

municipalities which could enable intercity learning, based on their

experiences of decentralized planning (Melin, pers. comm., 2017;

Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). It has however been noted that largely the

same work was being done as before (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

Building Capacity in Urban Sustainability in the Interurban Network

Apart from sharing Sida’s intention of contributing to urban sustainability

through development cooperation, taking over responsibility for the

SymbioCity concept was also seen as a way to build capacity in urban

planning in the network of Swedish municipalities. Whereas SKL

International had previously focused on administration, local democracy

and governance, this was seen as way of engaging more directly in a

BUILDING AND NETWORKING MUNICIPAL EXPERTISE

64

thematic area constituting one of the municipalities’ core activities

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017b). It seems as SKL International’s

institutional capacity of working with both decentralized local

government and international cooperation and experience sharing, rather

than any specific experience of urban planning, was seen as a motive to

engage with sustainable urban planning abroad. Nevertheless, the

Swedish experience and expertise in municipalities in working with urban

development issues was mentioned as a good starting point for further

development (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017b). While this has led to SKL

International building capacity in urban planning internally and also

gaining a larger network, it was noted that the knowledge of the

municipalities could be better utilized (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017b).

Since SKL International took over, the SymbioCity concept has been

applied to city projects in two phases: the first between 2010 and 2015

including urban development in four pilot cities, two in Indonesia

(Probolinggo and Palu), one in China (Duyun) and one in Zambia

(Mazabuka); the second (part of the SymbioCity 2.0 program outlined

below) from 2016 and ongoing, including a global program with six urban

development projects in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Colombia, and a

bilateral program with Kenya. In this phase, Sida wishes to emphasize

sub-Saharan Africa due to its directives to focus on least developed

countries (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a; Jarnhammar, pers. comm., 2017).

The projects in Visakhapatnam and Skopje were part of ongoing

programs to which Sida wanted to apply the concept (Melin, pers. comm.,

2017). The city projects in the phase between 2010-2015 seem largely to

have emerged as a result of previous personal and organizational

connections (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014, p. 24). In this phase, three out

of four projects were assigned a Swedish partner city, as a part of Sida’s

partner driven cooperation (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014). The

SymbioCity 2.0 program marks a new phase starting in December 2015

and lasting until December 2020, with a stronger focus on poverty


65

reduction and gender equality. Key concepts of this phase includes

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a; SymbioCity, 2017):

• Advancing the SymbioCity Approach – learning from

experiences of both successes and failures and seeing how they

can be disseminated to others

• City projects designed based on experiences obtained in

previous pilot projects in Europe, Asia and Africa, and on the

needs of targeted cities

• Capacity building activities to support capacity development for

urban development professionals in local, regional and national

governments – currently in the form of an educational program

in Myanmar based on city local case studies combined with

Swedish examples and methodology.

Operationalizing the Approach

After the concept had been transferred to SKL International, Ulf

Ranhagen was commissioned to author a second version of the manual.

Experiences from the pilot projects feed in to the this conceptual

framework (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012), e.g. leading to a better balance

between environmental and social sustainability (Dahlgren and Wamsler,

2014). The renaming of the manual as an approach was seen by the author

as a way to emphasize humility and adaptability towards the context of

application (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). The approach also underwent

consultation from partner institutions which were locally anchored

(Melin, pers. comm., 2017) and consultants with experiences from

working with Sida in developing contexts (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017).

This was done via workshops and seminars and included experts from

UN-Habitat, Mistra Urban Futures, the Swedish Ministry of

Environment, the Swedish Trade Council, u-PLAN Tor Eriksson AB,

Ulricehamn Kommun (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012). This consultation

also led to other actors engaging in using the process (Melin, 2017).

BUILDING AND NETWORKING MUNICIPAL EXPERTISE

66

When assigned with the responsibility of rolling out of the approach in

2010, SKL International had no previous experience of urban

development. They found the manual difficult to use in practice and

considered it necessary to make it more accessible to practitioners in the

cities, which resulted in the “Process Guide” (Andersson et al., 2013)

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a). The emphasis on the process was however

seen as a risk of losing the role of the outcomes of the concept, such as

visions, scenarios and results, which were seen as critical to ensure a long-

term perspective enabling more sustainable solutions. An expert group

was also formed at SKL International, consisting of architects, urban

planners, and others with competence to act as facilitators (Ranhagen,

pers. comm., 2017).

Black-Boxing Swedish Expertise in Urban Planning

The recognition of the necessity of engaging political leadership

eventually also resulted in the inspirational publication “Get started – Move

forward” (Andersson et al., 2014) being co-authored with decision makers

in several countries (e.g. Sweden, the Philippines, Ethiopia and Turkey)

who have driven urban development processes successfully (Falcón, pers.

comm., 2017a; Jarnhammar, pers. comm., 2017). The publication

provides guidelines for city leaders on how to facilitate sustainable urban

development building on the Swedish SymbioCity Approach. This

publication has been handed out during study visits and served as a basis

for workshops for political leadership, such as a network event held

during Habitat III, the United Nation’s bi-decennial conference on

housing and sustainable urban development which took place in Quito,

Ecuador, in October 2016 (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017b). In the language

of ANT, this provides an example of interessement, in which other actors

are made interested in the problem definition and locked into proposed

roles by accepting this definition and the obligatory passage points it

requires. The co-authoring of the report with an international set of


67

decision makers can be understood as them being mobilized to speak on

behalf of the network. The publication then serves as a token which

through its circulation helps to black-box the Swedish approach to urban

sustainability with the support of its spokespersons.

SymbioCity as an Obligatory Passage Point in the

Urban Planning Network

It seems as though SymbioCity concept has been established as an

obligatory passage point in the Swedish urban planning network’s

extension to low-income countries. It is interesting to consider whether

the passage point is the SymbioCity approach secretariat or the

SymbioCity approach itself. It is clear that the secretariat has become an

important node which coordinates a global network from which

resources, both financial and political support, as well as capacity in urban

planning, are gathered to be channeled to the local networks through the

individual projects. In these local networks, the approach is made the

starting point for all activities meant to contribute to urban sustainability.

In the language of ANT, this could perhaps best be described as the

approach being the obligatory passage point for which the secretariat acts

as a spokesperson, and which new actors must accept to become enrolled

in the actor-network. As an actant, the approach then constitutes an

embodiment of the idealized Swedish experience of urban sustainability

which, through its facilitators, guides the interactions of the local actors

in pursuing urban sustainability.

6.4 Overview of Documents and Events

An overview of documents describing the SymbioCity concept is

provided in Table 3. An overview of a selection of events and periods in

the development of SymbioCity is provided in Table 4. The first phase

began in 2001 entering of SWECO in a competition for urban planning

in Shanghai, eventually resulting in the first documentation of the concept

OVERVIEW OF DOCUMENTS AND EVENTS

68

“The Sustainable City - A Vision of the Swedish-Chinese Partnership in a Global

Context” (Ranhagen et al., 2002), and eventually in the development of the

SymbioCity concept in 2007. The second phase began with Sida

becoming interested in the concept around 2006, resulting in “The

Sustainable City Approach–Sida Manual for Support to Environmentally

Sustainable Urban Development in Developing Countries” (Ranhagen, 2008). The

third phase began with SKL International being assigned the mission to

continue developing the concept in 2010, eventually resulting in “The

Symbiocity approach: A conceptual framework for sustainable urban development”

(Ranhagen and Groth, 2012), a process guide (Andersson et al., 2013),

and a guide for decision makers (Andersson et al., 2014).

Table 3 Timeline of documents describing the Sustainable City concept

Year Document Reference

2002 The Sustainable City - A Vision of the Swedish-Chinese Partnership in a Global Context

(Ranhagen et al., 2002)

2008 The Sustainable City Approach – Sida Manual for Support to Environmentally Sustainable Urban Development in Developing Countries.

(Ranhagen, 2008)

2011 Developing Sustainable Cities in Sweden (Andersson et al., 2011)

2012 The SymbioCity approach: A conceptual framework for sustainable urban development

(Ranhagen and Groth, 2012)

2013 SymbioCity Process Guide - In search of synergies for sustainable cities

(Andersson et al., 2013)

2014 Get Started, Move Forward - Leadership in Sustainable Urban Development - A Guide for Decision Makers

(Andersson et al., 2014)


69

Table 4 Timeline of a selection of events in evolution of SymbioCity.

Year/ Period

Event Sources

2001 SWECO enters competition for urban planning in Shanghai.

(Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017)

2002 The Sustainable City concept is developed by Ulf Ranhagen via SWECO and presented at the World Summit of Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

(Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014)

2007 SymbioCity is launched as a platform to rejuvenate the concept for marketing purposes.


2008 World Urban Forum in Nanjing, China. Sweden sends 150 delegates and occupies a fifth of the international exhibition space.

(Hult, 2013)

2008 Sida’s urban unit is shut down. (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014)

2008-2009

The concept is applied in two pilot-cities in developing countries after being further developed by Sida into The Sustainable City Approach Manual.


2010 The SymbioCity concept is presented at the World Urban Forum 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

(Melin, pers. comm., 2017)

2010 SKL International is assigned by Sida via SALAR/SKL to develop the concept further.


2010- 2015

Application of SymbioCity in urban development in four pilot cities, two in Indonesia, one in China and one in Zambia.

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a)

2014 The SymbioCity concept is presented at the World Urban Forum 7 in Medellín, Colombia.

(Mejía-Dugand, 2016)

2016-present

A new work phase including a global program, with six city projects in Ethiopa, Zimbabwe and Colombia, a bilateral program in Kenya including cooperation with seven counties, and an educational program in Myanmar.

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a; Jarnhammar, pers. comm.,

2017)

CHAPTER SUMMARY

70

Chapter Summary

This chapter has dealt with three phases in the networking of Swedish expertise in

urban sustainability. In the first phase, the initiative to export Swedish expertise in

urban sustainability sprang from interest in combining urban planning with export of

environmental technology sparked by participation of Swedish actors in a competition

for urban planning in China. The need to communicate Swedish urban sustainability

in international arenas eventually led to this interest taking the form of the Sustainable

City concept. I show that this concept had a strong contextual origin within a

commercially oriented effort of promoting urban sustainability. The concept was thus

packaged as a uniquely Swedish concept to lend credibility and admirability to its

actors. This concept was propagated by a story of Sweden’s decoupling of carbon dioxide

emissions and economic growth, a story relying on a production perspective of emissions.

There was however a recognition that Sweden’s success story was not so much a result

of environmental technology as much as integrated planning processes. Establishing the

concept as an obligatory passage point in the Swedish expert network was meant to

help Swedish companies to sell environmental technology to new markets. In the second

phase, the challenges facing low-income cities in the Global South in combination with

the Swedish experience of urban sustainability motivated Sida to adopt the concept for

the purpose of development cooperation. After commissioning a manual founded on the

concept, it was then applied to two pilot projects to test its applicability to the developing

context. Sida was later invited by the Swedish Trade Council to form a common concept

of Swedish urban sustainability as a way of communicating a joint message of Swedish

urban sustainability. The third phase started with the transfer of SymbioCity from

Sida to SKL International and continues up until present day. Apart from sharing

Sida’s intention of assisting poor cities with urban planning, taking over the approach

has also been seen as a way of building capacity in urban sustainability within the

network of SKL. In this phase, the approach was applied to further pilot projects, a

second report was developed and additional documents were developed to operationalize

and promote the approach. The approach was propagated both by a message of Swedish

expertise in urban planning and by enrolling an international network of decision

makers. This helped to establish the SymbioCity Approach as an obligatory passage

point in the urban planning network

71

7 Mutation, Promotion and Impact of the SymbioCity Approach

This chapter discusses the actor-network by exploring three themes, namely

how the concept of Swedish urban sustainability has managed to mutate for purposes,

how it was promoted to the context of the Global South,

and how the circulation and performance of it has impacted on its recipients.

The chapter is concluded with a summary of the translations of urban sustainability.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

72

”The ultimate aim of the SymbioCity Approach is to

promote and encourage sustainable urban development,

primarily in low and middle income countries. By improving

the life conditions from environmental, socio-cultural and

economic perspectives, the SymbioCity Approach can

contribute to the alleviation of poverty. The conceptual

framework is generic and should be applied in a flexible way

according to the conditions and needs of the local context. The

Approach is thus also relevant for cities and towns also in

transitional and developed countries.”

(Ranhagen and Groth, 2012, p. 12)

MUTATION, PROMOTION AND IMPACT OF THE SYMBIOCITY APPROACH

73

7.1 Mutating the Concept for

Development Cooperation

This chapter discusses how the SymbioCity concept has managed to mutate for various

purposes, how these purposes have been combined to form a common platform for

Swedish urban sustainability and what doing so has meant in terms of synergies and

conflicts.

Mutation of a Commercial Model of Urban Planning

While taking a starting point which was largely commercially oriented,

both as a derivate from experiences from a technology consultancy firm

and later as a toolbox for promoting environmental technology, the

concept seems to have been carefully adapted to the purposes of

development cooperation, as elaborated in chapter 7.2. It appears the

Sustainable City and later SymbioCity Concept has been a sufficiently

generic concept to mutate to fit the purposes of a multitude of actors,

including those engaged with development and urban planning and those

more focused on marketing of environmental technology. The concept

seems to share qualities which previously have been observed to provide

fluidity to technological solutions (de Laet and Mol, 2000; Elam and

Sundqvist, 2011): 1) shifting boundaries of the solution, 2) a flexible

working order and 3) a compliant maker. Firstly, the concept has gone

from being focused on environmental technology to include emphasis on

the planning approach in the work of Sida and SKL International. The

approach as such is also broad and encompasses many considerations and

can be applied to a multitude of issues. Secondly, it can be applied for

various uses, including marketing, but also urban planning activities to the

extent which is deemed appropriate by facilitators or the users themselves

(Ranhagen and Groth, 2012). Thirdly, although its maker or author, Ulf

Ranhagen, has at times resisted certain alterations, he must be understood

as for the most part compliant in allowing the concept to be adapted for

purposes of both communication and application. Such compliances are

MUTATING THE CONCEPT FOR DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

74

exemplified by simplifications made by the communication firm when

forming the SymbioCity concept, and those made by SKL International

in operationalizing the approach through the process guide (Ranhagen,

pers. comm., 2017). Like the B-type bush pump, the fluidity of the

SymbioCity Approach seems to have rendered it “lovable” (see chapter

3.2) in that it has been able to find wide support, both for purposes of

marketing and development.

The notion of a Swedish urban sustainability has itself taken on a

multiplicity of meanings, where various actors have enrolled and

performed particular narratives and imaginaries to promote Swedish

urban sustainability, ranging from environmental performance to working

processes (Hult, 2013; Mejía-Dugand, 2016). The multiplicity of

translations of Swedish urban sustainability within the actor-network of

SymbioCity seems permitted by a notion of Swedish sustainability which

demonstrates sufficient interpretative flexibility to be black-boxed (i.e.

immunized against critique) in several ways and for more than one

purpose. Whereas the “Swedishness” of the approach has been

emphasized and fortified for purposes of trade, e.g. by trademark

registration and marketing activities focusing on Swedish technology, it

conversely seems to have been deemphasized for purposes of capacity

building and development cooperation, where the experiences from other

contexts and the generalizability of the approach have been considered

important for its applicability, relevance and its potential to gain funding

from other actors.

I would also argue that the Swedish Sustainable City concept has worked

well for its multiple applications due to its techno-managerial and

therefore depoliticized view of sustainability. At the same time,

distinguishing the concept from its commercial origin seems to have been

important for its credibility in its application to development cooperation.

For instance, SKL International considered it important that the

authoring of the report made on their behalf was done by Ranhagen via


75

his professorship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, rather than via

SWECO, so as to ensure the neutrality of the platform from its

commercial origin, and also wanted one of their own consultants, Klas

Groth, to co-author the report (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017).

Although the concept and message of Swedish urban sustainability has

managed to mutate, some entities seem to have been more stable than

others, e.g. the focus on environmental technology and Swedish

demonstration projects as examples of successful urban planning. The

persistence in the focus on environmental technology and sustainability

is evident from Sida’s problem formulation quoted in chapter 6.2 and

from the first Sida manual explicitly focusing on environmentally

sustainable cities. It is also worth noting continuities and connections in

the networking, such as that part of the reason for Sida’s city project in

Duyun, China, was a request from the Center for Environmental

Technology (CENTEC) within the Embassy of Sweden in Beijing

(Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014, p. 23). Expert interviewees in the

evaluation of the approach were reported to agree that the approach

could increase its relevance for poverty reduction if less focus was given

to environmental system solutions and more on socio-cultural, economic

and political aspects (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014, p. 17).

“Projects such as Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm and the

Western Harbour in Malmö won international recognition, in

both developing and developed countries, for their approaches to

sustainable urban development” (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012,

p. 9)

Swedish demonstration projects such as Hammarby Sjöstad furthermore

appears to be a consistent part of demonstrating the Swedish expertise in

urban sustainability, mostly in relation to Business Sweden’s activities, as

shown by Hult (2013) and Mejía-Dugand (2016) but also with delegations

from the cities working with SKL International (Falcón, pers. comm.,

2017a), as exemplified by the visit of the Kenyan council of governors


76

depicted in Figure 6 (Omenya and Krook, 2014). While several

informants deemphasized the role of such demonstration cities (e.g.

Ranhagen (2017) and Asplund (2017)) in the context of development

cooperation, their occurrence is noteworthy. Not only are they cities

which were deliberately built to showcase environmental technology, but

their promotion as role models have also been criticized as a form of

“lifestyle imperialism” in which supposedly efficient environmental

technologies provides a means of becoming more sustainable without

challenging more fundamental concerns, such as the lifestyle of the

inhabitants (Wangel, 2013).

Figure 6 Visit of Kenyan council of governors to Hammarby Sjöstad, Sweden. Source: Omenya and Krook (2014). Cropped by the author.


77

Uniting Disconnected Practices Under the Umbrella of SymbioCity

When Sida in 2006 decided to adapt the Sustainable City concept for its

purposes, there are no signs that there were any intentions of creating an

all-encompassing concept which included Swedish environmental

technology. Instead it was The Swedish Trade Council which in 2007

enrolled Sida to form a common platform. Whilst acknowledging the

dangers of mixing business and aid oriented interests, common arenas

such as conferences and a common foundation likely motivated a

common platform (Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). The actual use of the

approach in urban planning has also been seen as providing foundational

substance and trustworthiness to the concept in acting as a door opener

(Dahlfors, pers. comm., 2017). From Sida’s part the SymbioCity concept

being well packaged has later been seen as a comparative advantage to

other similar models (Melin, pers. comm., 2017). Furthermore, there has

always been an interest from the author of the approach to seek to bridge

the gap between institutional capacity building and the commercially

oriented solutions offered through the concept, where urban planning

would bring the two together. He has consequently tried to promote

closer engagement between SKL International and Business Sweden

although these efforts have so far been unproductive (Ranhagen, pers.

comm., 2017). This might be understood as a failure in an attempt of

establishing a common obligatory passage point of the two actor-

networks to unify the concepts.

At SKL International, transfer of technological solutions was considered

complicated due to the difference in contexts and they instead wished to

emphasize the planning approach; Swedish solutions are often founded

on stable and well-functioning administrations, availability of resources

and a long term perspective, which was thought to render them difficult

to transfer to contexts with scarce resources which may experience

corruption and a lack of administration (Jarnhammar, pers. comm., 2017).

Business Sweden and SKL International have however at times shared


78

arenas when asked to do so by embassies, for instance in Kenya (Falcón,

pers. comm., 2017a). There is however a recognition and emphasis of the

need to keep interest separated to avoid conditioning aid interventions

with expectations of doing business (Jarnhammar, pers. comm., 2017).

Mejía-Dugand (2016) notes that in events where SKL International and

Business Sweden have shared arenas, there has been a shift in how the

message of the Swedish delegation has been conveyed. From being top-

down it has, as he argues, shifted to allowing for more bottom-up

considerations to enter the discourse, although it is nevertheless evident,

as he argues, that the main task of the tool in such arenas is to promote

environmental technology. At instances when arenas have been shared

with Business Sweden, SKL International have seen it as their role to

provide an understanding of what solutions may be applicable and

relevant in the context (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a), which might be

understood as establishing themselves as an (im-)passage point (Maassen,

2012) in the actor-network’s common extension to the Global South. It

seems worth asking what role local businesses might play in exploring

solutions contributing to urban sustainability and why this question

hitherto appears to have received little attention. This may in part be due

to the fact that there has so far not been any means included for actual

implementation of solutions within the projects (Falcón, pers. comm.,

2017b).

While the complementary needs of communication seem to have

motivated forming a joint platform of Swedish sustainability it also

appears to have networked what are largely “disconnected” practices

(Maassen, 2012) under the same flag. While this disconnectedness has

caused some conflict over the marketing materials (particularly a

webpage), and created confusion among international urban experts and

Swedish municipal representatives, it has in practice been argued to have

negligible negative effect to the purposes of the actors’ interests

(Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014, p. 31; Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a).


79

7.2 Promoting Swedish Urban Sustainability to the

Global South

This chapter provides a discussion of how and specifically on what terms cities in the

Global South have been interested and enrolled in the actor-network of Swedish Urban

Sustainability, and some geographical aspects of this process.

Adapting the Approach for Travel to Low-Income Contexts

After Sida had become interested in the Sustainable City concept, several

efforts were made to ensure its applicability to the purposes of

development cooperation. Apart from Ranhagen’s own research and

experience from working with Swedish municipalities, the first manual

also incorporated knowledge from consultants with experience of the

developing context (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). To test the

applicability of the approach, two pilot projects were carried out, one in

Visakhapatnam in India and one in Skopje, Macedonia, during 2008-2009.

The experiences from the pilot projects then fed in to the revised

conceptual framework (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012), e.g. leading to what

was considered a better balance between environmental and social

sustainability (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014).

When the second report was developed on behalf of SKL International,

the approach underwent consultation from partner institutions which

were locally anchored (Melin, pers. comm., 2017) and consultants with

experiences from working with Sida in developing contexts (Ranhagen,

pers. comm., 2017). This was done via workshops and seminars and

included experts from UN-Habitat, Mistra Urban Futures, the Swedish

Ministry of Environment, the Swedish Trade Council, u-PLAN Tor

Eriksson AB, Ulricehamn Kommun (Ranhagen and Groth, 2012). This

consultation also led to other actors engaging in using the process (Melin,

pers. comm., 2017). The renaming of the manual as an approach was seen

by the author as a way to emphasize humility and adaptability towards the

context of application (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). Although not

PROMOTING SWEDISH URBAN SUSTAINABILITY TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH

80

explicitly a pilot, the project in Zambia was initiated because Sida wanted

to see the SymbioCity Approach applied in Africa and to test its

applicability in that context (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014). SKL

International also saw a need of making the approach more accessible to

practitioners in the cities which resulted in the “Process Guide”

(Andersson et al., 2013) (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a). The emphasis on

the process was however seen to risk losing the role of the outcomes of

the concept, such as visions, scenarios and results, which were seen as

critical to ensure a long-term perspective enabling more sustainable

solutions (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017).

“The approach is “Swedish” in the sense that it is in line with

key principles and processes of Swedish planning practice, which

can be characterised by being systematic, cyclical, decentralised

and, to a certain level, participative and inclusive. Sweden further

provides many best practice examples for sustainable urban

development. The approach’s relevance for poorer, less developed

contexts comes, however, to a great extent also from Swedish

experiences with supporting urban development planning in other

countries. In the words of Ulf Ranhagen, the main author of the

approach: “It is a marriage between Swedish and other

experiences”, which resulted from a “mutual, two-way learning

process”. The working procedures, including its low-tech tools

and focus on action plans, are evidence of this process, and a

crucial aspect of its relevance for more low-income contexts”

(Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014, p. 18).

Regarding the approach itself, the idea has been to adapt the concept to

the context of application by taking a starting point in the local, where the

analysis of actors is considered critical to determine who should be

included in the process (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). This was also

emphasized by the interviewed consultant, who stressed the importance

of ensuring representation of societal groups (Asplund, pers. comm.,


81

2017). From that foundation, the process can be “robustly” organized,

allowing for co-creation between the actors in analysis, evaluation and

mobilization of local competence. Once the foundation has been

established, examples of holistic system solutions can be introduced,

often through visits to Sweden, showcasing not only [emblematic

demonstration cities such as] Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm and Västra

Hamnen in Malmö, but also experiences from small and medium-sized

cities. While there is a recognition of the difficulty of altering political

structures, it was expressed that much can still be done within the existing

structures, exemplified by the interest of local participation in China. The

differences in contexts, e.g. cultural differences, was also considered to

enable leapfrogging, allowing for transitions directly towards technically

advanced and resource efficient solutions (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017).

A consultant mentioned that as Swedish technological solutions may be

difficult to transfer, it is more the Swedish approach which is relevant,

showing complex relations between technical, social, economic and

environmental factors, their interrelatedness and the potential of

synergies in addressing issues relating to them. This meant speaking less

of “Hammarby Sjöstad and more of sanitation” by using examples which

can be understood in the context (Asplund, pers. comm., 2017). Mejía-

Dugand (2016) notes the role taken by environmental technology

companies in relating to the contexts of application when arenas have

been shared, exemplified by the concerns raised by a local institution

working with informal waste pickers and recyclers regarding the impact

of implementing a waste disposal system. Mejía-Dugand suggests that

their experience from working abroad has given them competence to

address such concerns, in the provided example namely by responding

that it would not be a matter of two competing systems but rather that

recyclers pick what is valuable and someone must pick what is left.

PROMOTING SWEDISH URBAN SUSTAINABILITY TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH

82

The cooperation between municipalities was also considered to be

important in ensuring learning (Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). While

Swedish experiences of participatory processes are considered substantial

and relevant, there is also an acknowledgment of issues where

competence is insufficient, such as illegal and informal settlements. In

such cases there is an ambition to include experience and practices of

other organizations and donors (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a). While there

seem to have been unanimous appreciation of the intercity cooperation,

the limited experience of working abroad among municipal staff has also

been identified as an obstacle in relating to the context (Dahlgren and

Wamsler, 2014). As of current, the intercity cooperation has however not

been include in projects of the third phase, as traditional partnership was

thought to focus more on representation than practical engagement

(Falcón, pers. comm., 2017b). Ranhagen further wished to emphasize the

importance of learning from application of the concept and expressed

concern that such learning might not have happened sufficiently

(Ranhagen, pers. comm., 2017). However, the evaluation made on behalf

of Sida (Dahlgren and Wamsler, 2014), and the component of the

SymbioCity 2.0 concerned with learning from experiences point to

ambitions of doing so. In sum, it seems as though considerable measures

have been taken to adapt the concept to application in low-income

contexts and to ensure its ability to travel.

Communicating the Swedish Experience of Urban Planning

Apart from adapting the model for travel, the process of networking

Swedish urban sustainability has also meant preparing the recipients to

receive it. This is not just evident in the promotion of environmental

technology, with the mobilization of the story of Sweden’s decoupling of

economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. Rather, I would argue,

there are several examples of what has previously been denoted as

discursive preparation of recipients (Clarke, 2012b), through which the

policy model is made desirable. These include the promotional materials


83

such as the guide for decision makers, the hosting of workshops such as

the one at the Habitat III conference and study visits such as the one of

the Kenyan council of governors to Hammarby Sjöstad. In the language

of ANT, these preparations constitute a black-boxing in which the

translation of Swedish urban sustainability to low-income countries is

immunized against critique. An example of this is provided by the

enrollment of the international set of decision makers which lent

legitimacy to the inspirational guide. This is however not to say that the

networking of the Sustainable City concept has meant an uncritical

replication of Swedish solutions or even the approach, but rather that its

contents are conveyed beyond questioning. Conversely, Sida and SKL

International seem to have done well in considering contextual

differences, through iterative development of the approach informed by

experienced consultants, pilot projects, and reviews.

Geographical Aspects of The Actor-Network

While it is easy to imagine differences between Swedish cities and those

to which the SymbioCity concept is applied, a closer look at the actor-

network reveals noteworthy relational proximity between its actors. For

example many of the consultants engaged in the pilot projects, and

authoring and reviewing the manual had considerable experience from

low-income contexts, at times more than of the Swedish (Asplund, pers.

comm., 2017). These were also considered important to make up for any

difficulties arising from the limited relation to low-income contexts in the

interurban partnerships (Falcón, pers. comm., 2017a). While there was

considerable “niches differentiation” between Sweden and low-income

contexts, some of the projects, especially in Africa, were reported to show

considerable similarities, which were also thought to be likely to occur in

new projects. Differences in the application of the approach were

reported to be in large part related to the size of the cities (Asplund, pers.

comm., 2017). While the application of the approach has been reported

to have been successful in the projects, it seems unclear whether the

THE IMPACT OF CIRCULATING AND PERFORMING SWEDISH SUSTAINABILITY

84

approach has made any considerable impact in how problems are

approached (Asplund, pers. comm., 2017). Its “action across distance”

thus seems limited to the facilitated interventions.

7.3 The Impact of Circulating and Performing

Swedish Sustainability

This chapter provides a discussion of how the circulation and performance of this concept

has impacted on its recipients.

The circulation and performance of Swedish urban sustainability can be

understood through the lens of McFarlane’s (2011) distinction of three

interrelated ongoing processes in learning a policy:

• translation – actors’ mediation of relationships and knowledges7

• coordination – the use of structures and objects to organize

discussions about policies, and

• education of attention – shifting perceptions through hands-on

training

In the case of SymbioCity I have shown how the Swedish Sustainable City

concept has been translated for purposes of development cooperation.

This has been done both by mutating it from its commercial starting point

and by translating it for application in low-income contexts. The latter has

in turn been done both by adapting the concept for travel and by

discursive preparation of the targeted cities, as shown in chapter 7.2. In

this translation, consultants and reviewers have acted to mediate its

elements to fit the context, whereas documents describing the process to

policymakers and practitioners, along with facilitators and other

7Consistent with the definition provided by ANT


85

proponents have mobilized to intermediate its immutable elements

(which in themselves mediate the approach to urban) to the same

contexts.

Throughout this translational process, from the start and onwards, it

seems urban sustainability has been kept as a techno-managerial issue.

This is not to say that the approach to urban sustainability was understood

or conveyed as a process with an already established goal. Indeed, the

approach emphasizes the need of establishing an inclusive vision of urban

sustainability by means of multi-stakeholder engagement. Rather, the

techno-managerial framing consists in the model’s focus on how this is

to be achieved to the exclusion of what this means in political terms. This

framing is nonetheless surprising, given it partly being incepted from a

GIC-model (see chapter 3.3 and Hult (2015)) but also a necessity for the

model to travel, as is generally the case with policy mobility (Clarke,

2012a). It’s conveyance as a neutral model can in the language of ANT be

understood as being absent-present (Callon and Law, 2004) in the actor-

network; the actor-network’s extension depends on this neutrality, while

it simultaneously keeps the political nature of the traveling model beyond

questioning, i.e. black-boxed. It does not seem unlikely that this mutation

was enabled by the larger post-political trend in society in which ideas, in

this case regarding sustainability, can move freely between the domains

of business, policy and governance (see e.g. Raco and Lin (2012)).

Such translations of urban policies are learned through coordination, in

which different phenomena mediates the relations between the individual

and its environment (McFarlane, 2011). In the case of SymbioCity, such

mediation is provided by the SymbioCity Approach and its tools. To

clarify things, this means that the approach constitutes a mediation in the

relation between individual and environment, which is in turn an

intermediation of the Swedish conception of urban sustainability. These

tools are then complemented by the education of attention which is

provided by the facilitation of urban planning processes, through which

THE IMPACT OF CIRCULATING AND PERFORMING SWEDISH SUSTAINABILITY

86

the proper application of these tools is learned and a way of perceiving

urban issues is shaped. This can be understood as a form of relational

place-making process (Pierce et al., 2011), in which the SymbioCity

Approach shapes the place-frame of the sustainability transitions of the

recipient cities (Murphy, 2015). This place-making furthermore appears

to have become unidirectional according to the evaluation (Dahlgren and

Wamsler, 2014). This seems as previously observed, a result of the

rationalities of development cooperation (Clarke, 2012b). Whereas

Murphy argues that a place-making perspective of transitions is important

for the prospect of finding a consensus in the transition, I would stress

that the consensus orientation of the place-frame in this case is what is

problematic, as it precludes more politically radical conceptions of

sustainability.

Taken together, the export of Swedish urban sustainability could perhaps

be argued to be part of a sort of policy imperialism, as an analogy to the

“lifestyle imperialism”. This is what Wangel (2013) calls the Swedish

efforts of exporting environmental technology and urban sustainability

through the use of demonstration cities. This policy imperialism would

then consist of the promotion of urban sustainability as a techno-

managerial issue for cities in other countries to adopt. When considering

the translations made through the actor-network of exporting Swedish

urban sustainability, not only is what is promoted an idealized approach,

but also one which is contingent on Sweden’s particular experience of

sustainability. Firstly, as a high-income country which imports much of

its consumer goods, it has been possible to tell a story of decoupling

carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth by assuming a

production perspective of emissions. Secondly, understanding policy

making as a consensual practice could perhaps be understood as

permitted by Sweden’s relatively long history of peace and relative income

equality.


87

7.4 Summary of Translations of Urban Sustainability

During the evolution of the SymbioCity concept, several translations have

been made and actors have been enrolled at different points in time as

introduced in chapter 5.1. The businesses of SymbioCity can be

understood as export of environmental technology on the one hand, and

urban planning services on the other (Melin, pers. comm., 2017), briefly

presented in Table 5 and sketched in Figure 7. This section is limited to

providing an overview of what are understood to be the central

translations in the respective networks of technology and urban planning

export, presented in the terminology of ANT in Table 6.

Table 5 Analysis of the actor-network using Hallström’s (2003, p. 52) traits

Technology Export Urban Planning Export

Content Decoupling story, Business Sweden, delegations, embassies, exhibitions

SymbioCity Approach (part ideal, part experience), Swedish example cities, process guide, inspirational reports, Sida, SKL International, Swedish municipalities

Interests Exporting environmental technology, letting urban planning act as a door-opener

Development cooperation, exporting urban planning services, building capacity in urban planning

Power resources8

Funding for developing marketing materials, access to cities via diplomatic relations, exhibitions

Funding from Sida, network of municipalities, international network of decision-makers and expertise, exhibitions

Durability The decoupling story seems durable within its network, although it seems to have been deemphasized in relation to the development context

Central elements of the approach appear durable, while it has also been adapted to contexts and its applications

8 Power is according to ANT to be understood as an effect of the circulation

of immutable mobiles (Law, 2008). Power resources thus refers to what

resources have been employed in such circulation.

SUMMARY OF TRANSLATIONS OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

88

Table 6 Summary of Translations of Swedish Urban Sustainability in the Actor-Network of SymbioCity.

Technology Export Urban Planning Export

Problematization Framing of the problem, in this case the need for Swedish solutions and expertise in urban sustainability.

Swedish environmental

technology needs promotion

abroad. Decoupling of carbon

dioxide emissions and economic

growth is made possible by


technology. Sustainable solutions

require a holistic and integrated

approach to urban issues. A

united concept (planning

approach and technological

solutions) provides a more

convincing presentation of

Swedish urban sustainability.

Problematizations depend on

the actor who makes the

definition although Sida and

SKL International seem to have

been consistent in their

problematization: inclusive

urban sustainability and

development requires integrated

and holistic urban planning; it is

important for the reach of the

approach how well the tools are

communicated.

Interessement Getting other actors interested in the problem definition, locking actants into proposed roles by accepting the problem definition and obligatory passage points. Actors establishing themselves as obligatory passage points between the local and the global networks will be successful in pursuing the solution to their problem.

The SymbioCity marketing

platform seems to have been

established as an obligatory

passage point in the networking

of technology export which

renders Swedish solutions as

admirable: the experience of

decoupling carbon dioxide and

carbon dioxide emissions as

proof of the performance of

Swedish solutions, cities

approaching their challenges with

a mind-set which allows

considering integrated (Swedish)

solutions. It is notable that SKL

International does not seem to

share the emphasis on the

narrative of decoupling.

The SymbioCity Approach

seems to have been established

as an obligatory passage point in

the actor-network of urban

planning export, which draws on

resources from a global network

and determines how

sustainability is pursued in local

networks. Establishing a

common obligatory passage

point of the two actor-networks

to unify the concepts seem to

largely have failed, although

efforts were made by the author.

Nevertheless, the respective

needs of communication seem to

have motivated forming a joint

platform. However, it seems as

SKL International have tried to

establish themselves as a gate-

keeper or an obligatory passage

point to the two networks when

sharing arenas with Business

Sweden.


89

Enrollment Involving new actors in the network relationship on specific terms

Business Sweden has aimed for

cities accepting a holistic

perspective to urban solutions

and their part in the Swedish

experience of decoupling to

ensure the competitiveness of


technology. After doing so the

task of selling solutions has been

handed over to the respective

companies.

For SKL International,

enrollment has required cities

accepting the necessity of a

cross-sectoral approach and

working procedure to urban

planning. At times, this has also

meant pairing the city with a

Swedish counterpart to

cooperate as learning partners.

Mobilization Finding active support. Spokespersons speaking on behalf of the network. Black-boxing (estab-lishing good practices).

Business Sweden, embassies and

delegations speaking on behalf of

the decoupling graph and the

cross-sectoral approach. To be

successful, the local political

leadership need to have accepted

the necessity of a cross-sectoral

approach and the admirability of

Swedish solutions and to have

invited Swedish companies to

discuss possible solutions to the

issues at hand.

Sida and SKL International

along with their networks have

spoken on behalf of the

SymbioCity Approach which in

turn has drawn on Swedish and

international experiences and

networks and emblematic

Swedish demonstration cases to

motivate the planning approach.

SUMMARY OF TRANSLATIONS OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

90

Figure 7 Sketch of a selection of connections in the actor-network(s) of Swedish urban sustainability export

Busi

nes

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Pro

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91

The sketch in Figure 7 shows a selection of connections in the actor-

network of Swedish urban sustainability export. My intention is not for it

to be exhaustive but rather to provide a pedagogical overview as a means

of following the argumentation in the analysis. As the reader can

hopefully discern, the actor-network consists of two joined but largely

disconnected practices, as I elaborate in more detail in section 7.1. The

marketing platform and the urban planning approach applied in

development cooperation, seems to have drawn some legitimacy from

one another but have not been as closely connected as its author intended.

It is also worth pointing out that only at a handful of instances have the

two branches actually targeted the same cities. It furthermore noteworthy

that although embassies have been part of networking Swedish urban

sustainability, they have played several and largely separated roles in doing

so. This seems to be a result of the functions of export facilitation and

development cooperation being organizationally separated within the

embassies (Jarnhammar, pers. comm., 2017).

CHAPTER SUMMARY

92

Chapter Summary

In following the evolution of the Sustainable City concept, I argue that it has managed

to mutate so well “from trade to aid” due to its “fluid” qualities and a notion of

Swedish urban sustainability which can be flexibly interpreted. This mutation has

however created a network of joint but disconnected practices. Nevertheless, some

continuity is observed in the evolution of the actor-network, both in the stabilized

emphasis on environmental technology and the projects carried out. In tracing the

networking of Swedish sustainability, I argue that SymbioCity has followed a

previously observed pattern in which the approach has been adapted to travel and the

recipients have been prepared to receive the approach. In considering how the approach

has impacted its recipients, I argue that the translation of urban sustainability

throughout the network has turned focus away from the issue of what urban

sustainability actually is by coordinating activities and by educating the recipients’

attention towards techno-managerial problem framings. This view of urban

sustainability can be said to be permitted by certain interpretations of the Swedish

experience of becoming more sustainable, which can be related to Sweden’s economic

and political context.

93

8 Conclusions This chapter summarizes the findings

of this work and answers the research questions.

A discussion of the practical implications

of the findings are then provided.

The results are then related to previous research.

Finally, the limitations of this work are presented

along with recommendations for further research.

CONCLUSIONS

95

8.1 Summary of Findings

The purpose of this study has been to explore how Swedish actors have tried to

contribute to urban sustainability in low-income cities in the Global South and how

these efforts may have impacted its recipients. In this section I answer the research

question of why and how the actor-network of Swedish urban sustainability export has

emerged by first responding to its sub-questions as follows.

RQ1 By whom and for what purposes was the Swedish concept of urban

sustainability developed?

The Swedish concept of urban sustainability sprang from the

government’s interest in exporting environmental technology through

urban planning. In this phase, environmental technology can be said to

have functioned as a script, which guided the actors in the venture of

exporting Swedish urban sustainability towards establishing a holistic and

cross-sectional approach to urban sustainability as an obligatory passage

point in the actor-network. This approach was promoted by a story of

Sweden’s decoupling of carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth.

In a second phase, Sida identified a need for an integrated approach to

urban planning, such as the Sustainable City concept, in low-income

countries. This led to application of the approach to two pilot cities and

the development of a manual. Sida was later invited by Business Sweden

to form a common concept of Swedish urban sustainability as a way of

communicating a joint message of Swedish urban sustainability.

In a third phase, the application of the approach to urban planning in low-

income countries was transferred from Sida to SKL International. Apart

from sharing Sida’s intention of assisting poor cities with urban planning,

taking over the approach has also been seen as a way of building capacity

in urban sustainability within the network of SKL. The approach was

applied to further pilot projects, a second report was developed and

additional documents were developed to operationalize and promote the

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

96

approach. This helped to establish the SymbioCity Approach as an

obligatory passage point in the urban planning export network. Although

there have been intentions of creating a common concept and platform,

SKL International can be said to have established themselves as a point

of im-passage between the two largely disconnected branches of the

network.

I have shown that although some of the focus on environmental

technology had become stabilized, the approach could be adapted for the

purposes of development cooperation and capacity building. This

adaption seems to have been permitted by the interpretative flexibility of

what constitutes Swedish urban sustainability and the “fluid” and “lovable”

qualities of its conceptualization, overarched by a widely held view of

sustainability as a techno-managerial issue.

RQ2 How has the Swedish concept of urban sustainability been promoted

and circulated to low-income cities in the Global South?

In tracing the networking of Swedish sustainability, I have argued that the

SymbioCity concept has followed a previously observed pattern in which

the approach has been adapted to travel and the recipients have been

prepared to receive the approach. The approach was adapted to low-

income contexts by drawing on relations which can be understood as

geographically distant but relationally proximate. This included the

conducting of pilot projects, drawing on the experiences of Swedish

consultants and having the approach reviewed through a consultation

with partner institutions. The planning approach was demonstrated by

mobilizing a national network of municipalities and demonstration cities

was mobilized. Its application abroad was then legitimized by mobilizing

an international network of decision-makers along with networking

events, promotional material and study visits to Swedish cities and

municipalities.

CONCLUSIONS

97

In considering how the approach has impacted its recipients, I argue that

although its applications seem to have been appreciated, the translation

of urban sustainability throughout the network has turned focus away

from the issue of what urban sustainability actually is by coordinating

activities and by educating the recipients’ attention towards techno-

managerial problem framings. Swedish urban sustainability has been

translated in the actor-network of its export as achievable and transferable

to other contexts through an integrated and holistic planning approach.

The SymbioCity Approach provides a toolbox for coordination of

practices to that end. The concept also provides education of attention

through the hands-on training provided by the practical facilitation of

planning processes. Although its actual impact remains to be further

explored, it can be argued that the concept’s emphasis on a consensual

and techno-managerial approach towards urban sustainability contributes

to depoliticizing the notion of sustainability, in part by means of the

mentioned strategies.

Main RQ Why and how has the actor-network of Swedish urban sustainability

export to low-income contexts in the Global South emerged?

In sum, interests in exporting Swedish expertise in urban sustainability

have ranged from commercial to solidary, where different narratives of

the Swedish experience of sustainability have been emphasized in

pursuing those interests. While taking a commercial starting point, the

concept of Swedish urban sustainability seems to have been loved by

many and has managed to mutate to the purposes of development, which

has given rise to a network of joint but largely disconnected practices.

Common to the Actor-Network is however that its performances and

circulations have contributed to views of urban sustainability as

uncontestable. This view of sustainability can be said to be permitted by

certain interpretations of the Swedish experience of becoming more

sustainable.

RELATING THE FINDINGS TO THE LITERATURE

98

Whether the love of SymbioCity is desirable or not arguably depends on

how well contextual differences are taken in consideration in its

application and how SKL International plays its role as a gate-keeper

when at times sharing arenas with the environmental technology industry.

Most importantly however, it depends on the extent to which

sustainability becomes established as depoliticized and the consequences

thereof.

8.2 Relating the Findings to the Literature

In this section I relate the findings of the case study to theory and previous research. I

discuss the contributions from theory in the empirical understanding of the case and

vice-versa.

The Actor-Network from the Multi-Level Perspective

Relating the traced actor-network to transitions theory, the actors seem

to have sought to influence urban sustainability transitions at what can be

interpreted as several levels of the MLP, including political leadership

down to individual initiatives. Novelty has been identified in the approach

to urban planning, but also continuously in integrated systems solutions

including environmental technology. Obduracy has for instance been

encountered in the institutional setting, the political leadership and the

disconnection of the actors under the SymbioCity umbrella. The

opportunity (at the landscape level) for urban sustainability innovations

to travel to the Global South seems in part to come from a growing

agreement over and sense of urgency of the role which cities must play in

sustainable development, possibly serving as arenas (i.e. niches) for

exploration of more sustainable novelties. From a more critical

perspective, it can perhaps be argued that these landscape forces are

discursively reproduced to promote a depoliticized techno-managerial

model of urban sustainability.

CONCLUSIONS

99

Locating a Transitions Initiative in Space

Locating efforts of contributing to sustainability transitions in space have

provided an empirical in contribution understanding of the relevance of

international linkages. I have shown how actors in such linkages seek

shape the interplay of actors in the identification of novelties and

obduracies by framing them as techno-managerial issues and thereby

turning attention away from the political in this interplay. These linkages

have also been shown to be more complex than what might be expected

at a glance, as actors in both development cooperation and marketing of

environmental technology have developed relational proximity to

geographical contexts in which their Swedish (and thereby geographically

and contextually distanced) approaches to sustainability are to be applied.

As far as the depoliticized view of sustainability is prevalent at the global

scale, this yet again points to the necessity of understanding urban regimes

as being nested in regimes at larger scale which seek to influence the

dynamics of transitions. Cites are thus not just a certain locus of

transitioning but a type of locus which is complexly networked across

space and scales.

Contributions to Actor-Network Theory

This study has made an empirical contribution to ANT in showing how

a dialectic between a descriptive approach of ANT and explanatory

approaches of others such as socio-technical transitions theory and policy

mobility theory, can inspire empirical investigation by deemphasizing a

priori assumed structuration but at the same time informing a common

language of societal transition processes. I concludingly suggest that ANT

provides a good foundation in the continued cross-fertilization of

disciplines for advancing the understanding of such transitions.

RELATING THE FINDINGS TO THE LITERATURE

100

The SymbioCity Approach and Transitions Management

As SymbioCity has so far mostly been engaged with policy processes and

less so with actual implementation of urban solutions, its resemblance to

transitions management remains vague. It might however be said that the

critique aimed at transitions management by Kenis et al. (2016) appears

analogously relevant to SymbioCity as an approach as well. Firstly, its

deliberative view of democracy prevents the agonistic approach proposed

by Mouffe (2005), as elaborated in chapter 3.1. Secondly, although it

seems that facilitators have been careful to ensure broad inclusion of

stakeholders, representations are, as Kenis et al. (2016) notes, always

limited. Thirdly, it seems it has until now remained unaware to its own

post-political assumptions and the exogenous forces which have enabled

and propelled them.

Relation to Previous Research

To respond to the query of Hult and Rapoport (2017) regarding how

traveling sustainable urbanisms can come to include more focus on social

sustainability, it seems that it may result from the kind of mutation which

a transfer to a non-commercial actor such as Sida has motivated in this

case. This move towards inclusion of social aspects of expert

interventions in development cooperation is also notable in relation to

studies on aid, as is the movement towards inclusion of international

bodies of expertise compared to previous reliance on bilateral contacts

(Bruno, 2016).

CONCLUSIONS

101

8.3 Practical Implications of the Findings

Having now criticized the SymbioCity concept for contributing to de-

politicizing urban sustainability, it is only right that I try to address the

question of what a sound alternative or complement might be, if such is

at all to be found. In doing so, I wish to draw on suggestions already made

by others, and which I argue can be combined for a more egalitarian and

democratic North-South partnership for urban sustainability.

A Politics of Place beyond Place

Firstly, as a means of countering the unidirectional tendency in North-

South interurban partnerships, Nick Clarke (2012b) makes suggestions

for a more cosmopolitan urbanism. He follows Doreen Massey (Massey,

2005, 2007; Massey et al., 2011) in calling for a “politics of place beyond

place”. For his cosmopolitan urbanism, this means not transferring

policies between cities but transforming policies within them by paying

attention to their impact elsewhere. This could for instance refer to the

type of shift in attention made by Hult (2017) after considering the impact

of the productions perspective on emissions assumed when promoting

Swedish urban sustainability through SymbioCity; she instead turns to

consider how Swedish cities can contribute to more efficient energy

utilization domestically.

The Value of an Agonistic View of Transitions

The second argument would be to assume Mouffe’s (2005) agonistic

conception of democracy in which conflict or antagonism is recognized

as inevitable and in which actors understand their relations as political

opposition. As Machin (2013) argues, arriving at completely inclusive

agreements on sustainability issues is impossible, and it is therefore

important to be aware of the power which is inevitably at play. As Kenis

et al. (2016), suggests when considering how to improve Transition

Management theory, a transition initiative would do well to start by

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS

102

identifying and recognizing potential fault lines, power relations and

forms of exclusion and to thereby become reflexive of the political nature

of its endeavor. Such awareness, she argues, is critical both within

transition arenas themselves and in the relations between the arenas and

society at large.

Towards an Agonistic Politics of Place beyond Place

If these two arguments, calling for a politics of place beyond place and

the assumption of an agonistic view of transitions, are brought together,

it does not appear completely unreasonable for such partnerships also to

consider leaving room for inviting a critical perspective from the South

on Northern conceptions of urban sustainability. Such a shift might for

instance shed further light on the fault lines in Swedish urban

sustainability practice, which I have tried to address here, i.e. how well do

we represent stakeholders in (spatially) distant countries who may be

affected by the way we conceive and practice sustainability in Swedish

cities, and not least how we promote such practices to others. I argue that

this would enable a more genuinely democratic and cosmopolitan

urbanism than the consensus-oriented one (Raco and Lin, 2012) implied

by proponents of the post-political condition.

Perhaps this shift could be achieved by highlighting the political

dimension of urban sustainability (see e.g. Mössner (2016)) as a part of

the concept. In further practical terms, the shift could also be expressed

in the formulation of the foreign policies which shape the foundations for

development cooperation. It could for instance mean hosting discussions

on the suggested topics as a part of academic exchange, such as Mistra

Urban Futures or the partnership with the African Center for Cities which

is already established with the KTH Environmental Humanities

Laboratory.

CONCLUSIONS

103

8.4 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

Spanning a large and multifaceted network, this work has by necessity

been limited in some mentionable regards. Firstly, the empirics rely in

large part on views expressed by actors in the case study, which impedes

its reliability as a historical account. These views are however elemental

to the intended understanding of the translations which have taken place

in the actor-network, and they have also been complemented by cross-

checking documentation of the case. Secondly, the initial phase and

particularly the considerations and interests of government actors is not

thoroughly examined, which is however to be expected given the focus

on the succeeding phase in which the concept has been applied to

development cooperation. Lastly and most importantly, the actual

engagement with the targeted cities has been highly limited, which

precludes a thorough understanding of both its perceived and its actual

impact. Further research should therefore pay attention to how it has

affected the target cities, both in terms of attitudes and actual impacts. I

thus join Raco and Lin (2012) in calling for further investigation of not

only how post-political discourses are constructed but also their impact

for the day-today politics and development of cities.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

104

Chapter Summary

In this chapter I have concluded that interests in exporting Swedish expertise in urban

sustainability have ranged from commercial to solidary, where different stories of the

Swedish experience of sustainability have been told. While the concept of Swedish urban

sustainability has emerged from a commercial starting point, it has managed to

transform well to the purposes of development cooperation. While this transformation

has given rise to a network of somewhat disconnected practices, the efforts of both

branches have nevertheless contributed to establishing sustainability as being

uncontested in its nature. This view can be said to be permitted by certain

interpretations of the Swedish experience of becoming more sustainable. I argue that to

ensure that international cooperation for urban sustainability takes place on egalitarian

and fundamentally democratic terms, Swedish actors would do well to encourage and

facilitate inclusive and critical discussions of how urban sustainability should be

understood, in the North as well as the South. In relation to theory and previous

research this study has shown how urban sustainability transitions can be understood

as being depoliticized through somewhat complex international linkages. It also shows

a continuity in Swedish problematizations in development cooperation taking a starting

point in identification of Swedish expertise, although it reveals a shift in inclusion of

societal considerations. The main limitation of this work lies in the actual engagement

with the targeted cities, which prevents a thorough understanding of both the perceived

and the actual impact of the export of Swedish urban sustainability. Further research

should therefore pay attention to how it has affected the target cities.

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