A Swedish Model of Administration? State level Agency Autonomy from a Multi-Dimensional Perspective

Time period:

1 January 2017 – 31 December 2019

Project leader:

Helena Wockelberg

Project member:

Shirin Ahlbäck Öberg

Funder:

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Type of award:

Project grant

Total funding:

5,859,000 SEK

Governments today face complex problems such as migration and environmental threats, problems which cut across territorial and sectoral borders and are truly hard to handle. Politicans and scholars alike now call for innovative public management policies that can enhance the governing capacity and help solving these wicked problems of our time. State level agencies are at the hub of these processes and we aim to study the autonomy of these actors. While agency autonomy can enhance the quality of some decisions, and their legitimacy, it can also constitute an obstacle for inter-agency coordination that results in sub-optimal decisions. Also, the autonomy of state agencies must be matched with democratic control. To develop steering to enhance coordination, we need more and substantial knowledge about the actual autonomy of contemporary state agencies, and be sensitive to how this varies across policy sectors and administrative traditions. Hence, using unique large-N data in combination with interviews and a new survey, we will study formal and informal steering of agencies and their relationships with a broad range of actors in order to determine their autonomous decision-making capability. We study 1) whether agencies are autonomous or not in specific types of decision making (e.g. managerial decisions, policy-making and implementation); and 2) how levels of autonomy vary in relation to different types of actors (to whom or what are agencies autonomous).