The road to becoming fossil-free: the strategy governing the transport sector’s transformation in Norrbotten, Sweden

Abstract

Sweden has been praised for its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and now faces the self-claimed challenge of becoming the first fossil-free welfare state in the world by 2045. While the transport sector is the cause for a third of Sweden’s emissions, mainly originating from passenger cars, it is claimed as the sector that can most rapidly transform. The government, responsible for the transformation, wants to engage the whole society in governing this task. Previous research has emphasized the significance of spatial structure in decarbonizing the transport sector, identifying differentiated conditions, where more densely populated areas possess better conditions to reduce car use. The conditions in the northernmost county Norrbotten, stand out compared to the rest of the country as it is the largest surface-wise and less densely populated county that for a long time has been dependent on cars. Previous research points to an existing knowledge gap when it comes to the strategic governing of the transformation of the transport sector in Sweden, especially in the rural northern parts. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the strategies on multiple levels of government, focusing on passenger mobility in how responsibility is delegated to engage actors and the portrayal of the urban-rural divide. By using document analysis of official policy documents from national, regional, and municipal levels, the main findings illustrate a weak linkage between governmental levels in the multi-level governing of the transformation that capture both how actors are made responsible between levels and how urban and rural areas are approached in the strategies. Urban areas are furthermore portrayed as the main drivers of the transformation, while rural areas remain stagnant as dependent on cars. Their role in the transformation instead being providers of the resources needed. With findings pointing to the contradiction of means between levels to support their inclusion, the transformation of the transport sector may become exclusive.