The aim of this paper is to examine Sweden's Vision Zero road safety policy. In particular, the paper focuses on how safety issues were framed, which decisions were made, and what are the distinctive features of Vision Zero. The analysis reveals that the decision by the Swedish Parliament to adopt Vision Zero as Sweden's road safety policy was a radical innovation. The policy is different in kind from traditional traffic safety policy with regard to problem formulation, its view on responsibility, its requirements for the safety of road users, and the ultimate objective of road safety work. The paper briefly examines the implications of these findings for national and global road safety efforts that aspire to achieving innovative road safety policies in line with the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, declared by the United Nations General Assembly in March 2010.
In this article, the ideas behind two different speed camera systems in Australia, Victoria, and Sweden are explored and compared. The study shows that even if the both systems technically have the same aim – to reduce speeding – the ideas of how that should be achieved differ substantially. The approach adopted in Victoria is based on the concept that speeding is a deliberate offence in which a rational individual wants to drive as fast as possible and is prepared to calculate the costs and benefits of his behaviour. Therefore, the underlying aim of the intervention is to increase the perceived cost of committing an offence whilst at the same time decrease the perceived benefits, so that the former outweigh the latter. The Swedish approach, on the other hand, appears to be based on a belief that road safety is an important priority for the road users and one of the reasons to why road users drive too fast is lack of information and social support.
In order to evaluate road safety interventions and how their effects are created together with the ambition to transfer technology, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of the systems and their modi operandi in their specific contexts. This study has shown that there are major differences between the ideas behind the two speed camera programs in Victoria, Australia and Sweden and that these ideas have an impact on the actual design of the different systems and how these are intended to create road safety effects.
This article presents a viable method to overcome the challenge of producing reliable cause-effect findings in impact evaluation. The Measuring Cluster Effects through Triangulation method (MCET) involves methodological triangulation. Three designs - shadow controls, generic controls, and process tracing - are combined to shed light on causality. When these three approaches are triangulated, cause-effect findings will be more reliable. The MCET combination is a feasible alternative when randomized controlled trials and matched controls are impossible or impracticable. It is also an alternative to using a single non-experimental design, particularly in situations where expenditure is great and the causality issue is pressing. In this article, the MCET approach is illustrated by information drawn from a set of evaluations performed on the activities of the Compare Foundation, a cluster organization in Sweden in the Information and Communication Technology sector. Regionally based in Karlstad, County Värmland, and founded in 2000, the Compare cluster organization has adapted the MCET to its own activities.
This article introduces a new approach to program theory evaluation called theory-based stakeholder evaluation or the TSE model for short. Most theory-based approaches are program theory driven and some are stakeholder oriented as well. Practically, all of the latter fuse the program perceptions of the various stakeholder groups into one unitary program theory. The TSE model keeps the program theories of the diverse stakeholder groups apart from each other and from the program theory embedded in the institutionalized intervention itself. This represents, the authors argue, an important clarification and extension of the standard theory-based evaluation. The TSE model is elaborated to enhance theory-based evaluation of interventions characterized by conflicts and competing program theories. The authors argue that especially in evaluations of complex and complicated multilevel and multisite interventions, the presence of competing theories is likely and the TSE model may prove useful.
Evaluation and network governance are both among the top-10 trendy concepts in public policy. But how are they related? In the present article, we ask how public sector interventions guided by a network governance doctrine are to be evaluated. If evaluation means systematic judgment of organization, content, administration, outputs and effects in public policy, then evaluators need concepts and analytical tools to assess these features and communicate their analyses. In the literature, interest in network modes of governance often goes together with a call for a renewed vocabulary for evaluation and policy analysis. In the article, we do not take this to be a fact. Instead we turn it into a question: How relevant and productive are established concepts and tools of evaluation theory for evaluating network governance? More specifically, we address the issues of purposes and merit criteria in evaluation of interventions fashioned according to the network governance doctrine. Though it takes some elaboration, our overall conclusion is that at least some standard evaluation concepts and approaches are still productive in delineating, analysing and prescribing how network governance can be evaluated. There are crucial accountability issues to raise, the goal-achievement criterion is not irrelevant and the meaning of stakeholder evaluation is elucidated when confronted with the ideas of the network governance doctrine.
Over the last two decades, a movement for Evidence-Based Management (EBM) has surfaced across the Atlantic world with pretensions of being a successor of New Public Management (NPM). In this paper, we focus on Swedish social welfare as an arena where persistent government attempts have been made to implement locally new evidence-based ideas, specifically evidence-based practice (EBP). In Swedish discourse, the meaning of “evidence-based” is contested. One interpretation maintains that best (and only acceptable) evidence comes from the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Another interpretation maintains that evidence from research constitutes only one leg of a multi-factorial definition; that is, this view contends that RCT evidence should be considered along with experience of practitioners and clients (users). Although client participation was an important tenet in the incipient attempts to implement EBP, by using translation theory this article will show that later attempts have tended to ignore the client’s perspective. From this foundation, we address why client views and outlooks have been ignored in EBP implementation.
Social distancing measures have been a key component in government strategies to mitigate COVID-19 globally. Based on official documents, this study aimed to identify, compare and analyse public social distancing policy measures adopted in Denmark and Sweden regarding the coronavirus from 1 March 2020 until 1 October 2020. A key difference was the greater emphasis on laws and executive orders (sticks) in Denmark, which allowed the country to adopt many stricter policy measures than Sweden, which relied mostly on general guidelines and recommendations (sermons). The main policy adopters in Denmark were the government and the Danish Parliament, whereas the Public Health Agency issued most policies in Sweden, reflecting a difference in political governance and administrative structure in the two countries. During the study period, Sweden had noticeably higher rates of COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations per 100,000 population than Denmark, yet it is difficult to determine the impact or relative effectiveness of sermons and sticks, particularly with regard to broader and longer-term health, economic and societal effects.
Perverse effects and ironies should be at the center of attention in academic public policy analysis. A ‘perverse effect’ is not any inadvertent result produced by a public measure but a result, inside or outside the target area, that is entirely opposite to the result intended. An ‘irony’, as defined here, is different from a perverse effect in that it designates any unintended and unexpected result whose causes are unknown or left without comment. The pronouncement ‘this is an irony’ means ‘this is an unexpected result’; the statement ‘this is a perverse effect’ means ‘this is an unexpected, diametrically opposite result at least partly produced by the intervention’ (Vedung 1998a. Utvärdering i politik och förvaltning. Lund: Studentlitteratur, p. 62).
The article deals with the ironic result of an economic policy instrument in Swedish national housing land policy, the Land Stipulation Requisite for State Housing Loans 1974–91. The purpose of the requisite was that the pertinent municipality (not a private landowner) must have allocated to the building commissioner the land for his planned residential development if he was to be granted state housing loans.
The policy makers expected that the share of the total housing production taking place on land supplied by municipalities would increase. Yet between 1972 and 1990 the housing production on land supplied by municipal authorities decreased. This puzzling gap, referred to as the ‘enigmatic irony’ of the Land Stipulation Requisite, is explained. The explanation is phrased in the terminology of a general theory of public intervention results. The explanation may be summarized as ‘exception as the rule’.
Frontline practitioners like teachers in public-sector education systems are not policy takers but policy makers, according to Michael Lipsky’s seminal treatise Street-Level Bureaucracy, first published in 1980. They make policy by using their wide autonomy to adopt coping mechanisms, such as limiting client demand and creaming (cherry-picking). Winter and Nielsen have developed this into (1) reducing demand for output, (2) rationing output and (3) automating output. These distinctions are briefly clarified in the article. Do they have relevance for school systems and other Nordic public-sector frontline activities? The question is raised but left to upcoming research to clarify.
Stora projekt som finansieras av EU utvärderas alltid. Men är dessa utvärderingar rättvisande? Letar man efter de verkliga och hållbara effekterna? Att fånga effekter av stora projekt är en svår uppgift. Inte minst beror det på att verkningarna kan vara av många olika slag - oväntade, icke avsedda, överraskande, dolda och ibland utanför målområdet. Det gör det inte mindre angeläget: dessa effekter kan vara viktigare än de planerade, avsedda och förväntade. I denna bok beskrivs resultatet av ett flertal analyser av utvecklingsarbete i stora projekt och program - i organisationer, på regional nivå, i nationella program med mera. Slutsatserna dras från teoretiska analyser samt från en lång rad empiriska studier. Boken vänder sig till forskare, regionalt utvecklingsansvariga och myndighetsföreträdare. Den kan användas i utbildning av olika slag - inom flera områden i högskolan och till projektledare, utvärderare, följeforskare och finansiärer samt projektägare.
This article analyzes the historical development of policy (intervention) evaluation in the Atlantic or Western world in 1960-2022. The five waves have left their sediments in the pertinent public or non-public sectors , i.e., each new wave does not completely eradicate its predecessor. Five difference waves are identified, namely, 1) scientific wave, b) dialogue-oriented wave; 3) neo-liberal wave (New-Public-Management wave): 4) evidence-based wave; and, 5) Gollaborative-governance wave (New-Public-Governance wave). Over tine, it seems that evaluation oscillates between strict scientification (w 1 and 4) and strict democratization (w 2 and 5). Second, m The challenge that evaluation experts have ahead is to seek the theoreticaland operational integration of the five waves mentioned, but we must recognize that it isan extremelycomplex task.
This article investigates the dissemination of evaluation as it appears from a Swedish and to a lesser extent an Atlantic vantage point 1960-2010. Four waves have deposited sediments, which form present-day evaluative activities. The 1) scientific wave entailed that academics should test, through two-group experimentation, appropriate means to reach externally set, admittedly subjective, goals. Public decision-makers were then supposed to roll out the most effective means. Faith in scientific evaluation eroded in the early 1970s. It has since been argued that evaluation should be participatory and non-experimental, with information being elicited from users, operators, managers and other stakeholders through discussions. In this way, the 2) dialogue-oriented wave entered the scene. Then the 3) neo-liberal wave from around 1980 pushed for market orientation. Deregulation, privatization, contracting-out, efficiency and customer influence became key phrases. Evaluation as accountability, value for money and customer satisfaction was recommended. Under the slogan ‘What matters is what works’ the 4) evidence-based wave implies a renaissance for scientific experimentation.
Idéanalys är en genuint svensk inriktning inom statskunskapen. Som uppfinnare räknas Herbert Tingsten på 1930-talet, då han utvecklade en egen speciell ideologikritisk metod. Han gav den namnet ”idékritik” och tillämpade den först på fascismens och nazismens idéer, senare på konservatismens och slutligen på den svenska socialdemokratins idéutveckling med dess brott med marxismens deterministiska ödestro. Utifrån detta har den vuxit ut till något betydligt bredare.
Public policy and program evaluation isa recent addition to a chain of attempts by governments to use the brain power of academics and scientists to further the interests of the state. Evaluation specialists are asked to provide retrospective assessments of the implementation, cost-effectiveness, and results of government measures in order to engage in self-reflection, deeper understanding, and soundly in-formed decisions by stakeholders. those responsible for the government. Good intentions are notenough. Good practices and solid results matter in evaluation. Evaluation involves looking back inorder to better look forward. It is a mechanism to control, systematize and graduate government ac-tivities and their results to guide them to the future, and allow officials to be able to act in the mostresponsible, creative and efficient way possible. The interventions of the modern State are complex and their consequences are far-reaching, therefore, it is necessary for science and social research to guide the operations and determine the impacts