How do environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors affect local environmental policy decisions?

Over a year ago, together with Professor Katarina Elofsson, we published an academic paper on the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. 

Link to paper

What was the objective of the article?

The objective our study was straightforward. In the context of Sweden, the national government enacts national policy for protection of surface water quality. Municipalities then must decide whether to enact local policies (environmental targets and action plans) to go beyond those set on the national level and to take policy decisions at the regional or local level as required by the EU Water Framework Directive. Municipalities also may decide to allocate these decisions to a responsible authority. This presents the research question:

We assess how environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors, as well as the availability of environmental expertise, affect these municipal decisions.

What are these factors that affect municipal decisions?

We assess how these municipal decisions are affected by the following variables:

• Oxygen concentration in water bodies
• Total surface water area
• Total area of nature reserve land
• Coastal length for each municipality
• Population
• Average per capita income
• Cooperation with the county administration
• Whether the decision to adopt goals and plans is affected by the assigned responsible body
• Involvement of interest groups in policy development
• Involvement of businesses in policy development
• Number of farms within the municipality
• The area of agricultural land
• Political representation within the municipal council of the Green and Center Party.

For a full description of the motivation and methodology on why we chose these and how we did the analysis, please click on the link above.

What were the overall results?

In this study we found that municipalities are more likely to adopt local environmental targets and action plans for those that had:

• Poor water quality
• Larger coastal lengths
• Higher per capita income
• Collaboration with environmental interest groups
• Fewer numbers of farms but larger farmland
• Higher political representation of the Center Party

What next?

While this article has interesting results, there is scope for expansion in the future. Similarly, it would be interesting to see if other EU countries have experienced the same or similar results. As other countries do not have the same system as Sweden, I would expect some factors may produce different results.