Functions of sustainability: exploring what urban sustainability policy discourse “does” in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT

Studies on urban sustainability policy often analyse what it is, could or should be in terms of contents, objectives and rationale. Often neglected, however, is what sustainability discourse actually “does”. For this article, we explored the function of sustainability discourse in a collaborative metropolitan governance process of 1998–2014 that resulted in an infrastructural strategy aiming for “sustainable growth” in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area (GMA). We asked why sustainability had become a hegemonic concept in urban politics despite the paradoxical decoupling of objectives, outputs and outcomes from environmental protection and social equity in policy achievement. We argue that sustainability works as a vehicular idea that brings significant value to fragile governance arenas by functioning as a linguistic political mechanism with no essence other than the capability to attract positive affections for any coalition of actors with the power to mobilise others. In the GMA, sustainability served as a cohesive and mobilising discourse empowering a coalition of techno-economic experts to “get things done” and make an unruly city region governable enough to develop infrastructure perceived as crucial for the advancement of economic-growth projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable cities
• city region
• metropolitan governance
• discourse coalitions
• Gothenburg

We want to create an equal and sustainable Gothenburg. Therefore, we govern the city on the basis of three sustainability dimensions – social, ecological and economic sustainability – which are mutually dependent. (Göteborg 2016a)

Gothenburg will be a forerunner in environmental and urban development and one of the world’s most progressive cities when it comes to addressing climate and environmental problems. (Göteborg 2016b)

1. Introduction

Sustainable urban development is usually regarded as a much-needed political paradigm in urban policy and planning. In the quotes above, three-dimensional sustainability and, in particular, environmental protection are raised to the political agenda and serve as a metanarrative for urban development ambitions. Critics argue that the rhetorical shift towards sustainability is decoupled from actions, and that policies lack accurate and effective contents, resources and outcomes. Instead, policy decisions are based on rationales that rely on eternal economic growth, with negative consequences for the environment and social equities (Hilding-Rydevik et al. 2011, Béal 2012, Raco 2014). This paradox, and the rapid rise of fuzzy “sustainability” as an all-encompassing meta-ideology in urban politics, has triggered debate and studies on what the concept really is and what it could and should be (e.g. Mebratu 1998, Wheeler and Beatley 2014, Wilson 2015). Sustainability, then, is regarded as an undisputed normative objective and a tangible condition that can manage the crisis of ecology and uneven development and be realised if the appropriate mix of utopian thinking, technological know-how and political mobilisation are combined (Kemp et al. 2005, Jordan 2008, Griggs et al. 2013, Lundström et al. 2013, Metzger and Rader Olsson 2013). The literature on urban sustainability policies offers much insight on what is and what is not sustainability, categorised as “weak” or “strong” (Gibbs 1998, Neumayer 2013) in nuances of green or other matrix typologies (McManus 1996), usually focusing not only on the relation between the economy and the environment, but also on issues of social equity (Holden 2012). However, disagreement as to the “true” meaning of “a sustainable city” is creating tremendous analytical and normative diffusion (Campbell 1996, Engelman 2013, Shaw 2013). Bringing order to this theoretical chaos has become a useful genre in itself: Is sustainability a “decision-guiding strategy” (Hugé et al. 2013), a “contested concept” (Connelly 2007), a multicoloured ideology of political economy (Davidson 2014) or “a road to perdition” (Gunder 2006)? Investigating what sustainability is may produce possible urban development trajectories to deal with social and environmental challenges. Nonetheless, what urban sustainability discourse does is often neglected, especially when power elites gather to discuss.

In this article, we explore the functions of sustainability discourse in deepening our understanding of sustainability as a hegemonic concept in urban politics. We concur that “actual existing sustainabilities” (Krueger and Agyeman 2005) are political constructs, a diverse set of ideas and practices that frame (selective) issues of environmental degradation and inequality on political agendas (Gibbs and Kreuger 2007, Bulkeley and Betsill 2013). However, sustainability mainly works as a discourse or a linguistic political mechanism with no essence other than attracting positive affections in order to accomplish something (Cox and Béland 2013). We use the discourse-coalition approach (Hajer 1997, 2005) and a mode of transdisciplinary co-production methodology to unfold and interpret the case of a metropolitan governance process, and an infrastructural plan for sustainable growth in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area (GMA) to illustrate how urban sustainability discourse increases cohesion and mobilises capacities to rescale governance arrangements. Sustainability discourse serves to render the unruly city region governable for the advancement of infrastructural development in transport and housing with a market-oriented, economic-growth-first rationale (Jonas and Ward 2007, Krueger and Savage 2007, McCann 2007, Brenner 2009). In the GMA, sustainability is a “fix” (Jonas 2015) to “get things done” for a coalition of actors powerful enough to mobilise others.

The structure of the article is as follows. First, we describe the hegemonic status of sustainability discourse in Gothenburg together with a brief overview of the paradoxical policies on carbon emissions, social equalities and economic growth. Second, we develop a theoretical understanding of the functions of sustainability discourse in urban development politics, followed by a description of research methods. The main part of the article describes in detail the function of sustainability discourse in the GMA. Finally, we put the function of sustainability discourse in the GMA into a broader perspective of relevance for planning policies and practice, and concerning the role of transdisciplinary collaborative research processes with the aim of joint knowledge production for achieving more sustainable urban futures.

2. Hegemonic sustainability discourse in the GMA

The politics of urban sustainability are paradoxical. They decouple content, policy objectives, policy measures and outcomes (Granberg and Elander 2007). This was the fundamental starting point of our argument. Gothenburg was a suitable context to understand this paradox. The City of Gothenburg is the second largest in Sweden with half a million inhabitants and another million in the neighbouring 12 municipalities of the metropolitan area. The city is heavily engaged in sustainability discourse. “Sustainable city – open to the world” is the city slogan, and its website informs that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently appointed Gothenburg the National Earth Hour Capital 2015. It also declares that policy-makers “can now proudly continue the transition to a fossil-free city”. The city also “recognizes and supports work towards sustainable development” with the international Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development (Göteborg 2016b).

Sustainability discourse has dominated not only the city’s policy ambitions and marketed self-image, but also the comprehensive strategy of the metropolitan collaborative planning association of the 13 municipalities in the metropolitan area, the Regional Association of Local Authorities in the Gothenburg Region (GR), Sustainable growth: goals and strategies that focus on a sustainable regional structure (GR 2006, 2013a). The purpose of the GR is to promote cooperation over municipal borders in the metropolitan area on issues such as regional planning, the environment, traffic, the job market, welfare and social services, skills development, education and research. The sustainable-growth (GR 2013a) strategy was formed after five rounds of deliberative consultations with over 1000 elected politicians in each of the 13 municipal councils from 2002 to 2013. The objectives were framed as regional expansion, defined as the growth of the metropolitan area labour market by a population increase from 1 million to 1.75 million people and the anticipated greater efficiency in the commuting and transport infrastructure by privileging public transportation. Significant measures of urban densification and transport infrastructure development have been aimed to increase the metropolitan population and the public commuting share of individual transportation from 20% to 40%. The GMA is anticipated to grow by 180,000 dwellings and 110,000 workplaces by 2030 (of which 45,000 dwellings and 60,000 workplaces will be in the city centre). Västsvenska paketet, or the West Swedish Agreement, which bundles investments and introduces congestion charges for the city of Gothenburg, will further reinforce and finance the development of transportation infrastructure. As much as SEK 34 billion will be spent to improve not only the railroad, specifically underground tunnels and stations, but also roads, tunnels and bridges for automotive traffic.

The GMA is growing rapidly. Beyond the rhetoric of social, ecologic and economic sustainability remains the failure to deal with the challenges of pollution, carbon dioxide emissions, social inequality and racial residential segregation. Official municipal goals include less than 3.5 tonnes of greenhouse gas emission per person and year by 2035 and 1.9 tonnes by 2050 (Göteborg 2014a). However, given the increased consumption of goods, air travel and meat, even the fully effective application of current transport and housing efficiency policies will fail to sufficiently reduce levels of emissions (Larsson et al. 2014, p. 6). Since the 1990s, inequality in living conditions has been an ever-growing issue. Mean income in the city district with the highest income was twice the mean income of the poorest districts by 1992; by 2011, it was five times higher (Göteborg 2014b, p. 96). Racialised segregation, unemployment and poverty in stigmatised and marginalised neighbourhoods cause differences in health, pupils’ performance in school and participation in the city’s social and political life. The negative impacts include social unrest (Andersson et al. 2010, Malmberg et al. 2013, Göteborg 2014b). Development policies can be made to appear successful, however, by measuring economic progress by the gross regional product of the GMA, which increased by 41% between 2000 and 2011, coupled with a population growth of about 6000–11,000 inhabitants per year during the same period (GR 2013a).

The main issue we address in this paper is why urban sustainability policies, with their inadequate and paradoxical results, continue to dominate and govern nearly all urban governance ambitions. Despite shortcomings in terms of both policy objectives and outcome, talking about and aiming for sustainability are still successful practices in urban politics. The aim of this paper is to discuss why this is so by exploring the functions of urban sustainability discourse in governance. Sustainability policies in the GMA provide the empirical foci of our argument as we review the collaborative process in the GR that resulted in a policy for sustainable growth. In the next section, we develop a theoretical understanding of the functions of sustainability discourse in urban politics.

3. How sustainability discourse functions

Following Hajer (1997), we define discourse as an ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is given to phenomena, alliances and coalitions can be built and power can be mobilised. The function of discourse in urban politics can be understood by tracing the processes in which discourses are hegemonic and reconstructing how a specific discourse emerges, gains structure and becomes institutionalised. This, the discourse-coalition approach, is a way to elucidate how discourse helps form coalitions, and how coalitions use discourse to advance their agendas. The participants in a discourse coalition who share stories such as sustainable growth are often situated both inside and outside governmental institutions. It is important to understand that sharing differs from consensus. According to Hajer, the storylines that are central to the making of a discourse can be viewed as condensed statements conveniently summarising disparate narratives – facts in stories – into something bendable enough to guide a policy process over a long time. In given situations, adversaries can share a common storyline articulated by members of the coalition (Hajer 2005). However, they can still be adversaries. Narratives or storylines are shared, as Hajer defines it, but allow for plurivocity, as elaborated by Lejano et al. (2013, p. 21). In other words, discourse coalitions make room for multiple and varying narratives, meaning that several actors with different stories can stay networked through a coherent metanarrative. Hence, narratives are a means of constituting the network and allow members to maintain and reproduce the network through statements, histories and projects (Cox and Béland 2013).

The important part is that discourse not only frames what is possible and necessary to say or do, but also makes the “doing” of it possible. When specific ideas, concepts and notions are shared by group members, a discourse coalition is formed. The building of a discourse coalition necessitates the use of linguistic mechanisms: metaphors and storylines. Several more or less coherent coalitions usually dominate a distinct institutional context. It is the act of institutionalising a discourse that constitutes the hegemony of some coalitions over others. Following Hajer, there are two criteria that create this domination: Discourse structuration forms the discourse and mobilises central actors’ convictions and acceptation of the rhetorical power of a certain discourse. Storylines are produced through deliberation and the production of knowledge. The structuration imprints practices upon political domains: The policy process becomes organised along the discourse. Discourse institutionalisation means that storylines become dominant in a specific context, while other discourse coalitions coexist with perhaps less structured and less dominating storylines.

How, then, can we understand the specific functions of an urban sustainability discourse? Despite its radical roots in environmental movements, the sustainability discourse is initiated, handcrafted and disseminated to cities by global, multilateral, national and regional institutions from above. As such it is an elite discourse (van Dijk 1993) mediated by a technocracy (Fischer 2005, p. 22) of technically trained and experienced policy officials, knowledge elites, experts, consultants, researchers, evaluators, gurus and so on. These members of the technocracy play important roles as intellectual mediators in the policy process (Osborne 2004). However, in order to sell the idea of sustainability to democratic governments, the discourse must bring a specific meaning to politics; it must add value. In the wake of global environmental disasters and economic crises, sustainability offers meaning to both political objectives and an imagined socioecological condition in the public mind (Gunder 2006). Marcuse (1998) sees the powerful attraction of sustainability discourse because of its universal acceptance (pp. 104, 111), and Swyngedouw (2007, p. 27) recognises its power in “the radical contestation of alternative future socioenvironmental possibilities” matching public concerns over environmental degradation. For Parr (2009, pp. 3–4), the value sustainability accumulates for political and corporate interests can be found in the way it has joined the mainstream culture. Increased public concern over global warming and poverty is, according to Parr, the root of a “sustainability culture” motivating industries and political organisations to exploit the idea in order to level economic value or to mobilise political currency.

Popular ideas are excellent mobilising forces. Fuzzy concepts can work as vehicular ideas – elastic yet highly potent concepts that can be used by any set of actors to move things along without resolving immanent and unavoidable conflicts (Peck and Theodore 2010). In the words of McLennan (2004), vehicular ideas are in many ways resistant to theorisation and stringency, but this is not their point. Instead, “they serve as inclusive umbrellas under which a wide range of advocates can shelter, trade and shift their alignments and allegiances (…) to make things happen at a particular time” (p. 485). Gressgård (2015, p. 109) uses the politics of “social sustainability” in the city of Malmö, Sweden, to illustrate how the sustainability agenda may have less to do with the practical relevance of achieving a socially just city and more to do with uniting – “the power of attachment” – with a fantastic narrative. Likewise, a “sustainable city” has no essence but attracts positive energy and affections in order to accomplish something – but what?

From the urban sustainability fix perspective, sustainability discourse operates as “a spatially and historically contingent organisation of economic interests, institutional capacities, and political positions that allows development to process despite economic and ecological crisis in the face of growing popular concerns about the state of the environment” (Temenos and McCann 2012, p. 1390). Based on Harvey’s theory, a “spatial fix” (1982) denotes how capital reacts in order to postpone or solve a crisis by uniting territorially based interests behind a common class-based strategy. Thus, a fix solves problems but creates dilemmas simultaneously. The function of sustainability discourse could thus be to enable urban development despite economic and ecological crisis, by means of safeguarding “growth first” political trajectories and selective environmentalism (While et al. 2004, p. 551, Jonas 2015).

Metropolitan governance arrangements usually engage contentious actors for the purpose of transcending political boundaries in order to move things along towards a minimal set of mutual gains. As Brenner (2009) argues, the emergence of metropolitan governance can be understood as an ongoing process of re-territorialisation of statehood and post-Keynesian spatial strategies by consolidating new growth-oriented and competitiveness-driven politics (see also McCann 2007, Etherington and Jones 2009). Metropolitan governance arrangements are privileging cities and metropolitan areas as sites of capital investment and accumulation that transform cities into what Brenner terms a “rescaled competition state regime”. These regimes are unstable and unconsolidated arrangements, as several experiences of governance failure show (Lefèvre 1998, 2010, Janssen-Jansen and Hutton 2011). Setting metropolitan collaboration in motion in order to get things done creates fragile processes that generate “intense struggles between opposed class fractions, political coalitions, and territorial alliances regarding issues such as jurisdictional boundaries, institutional capacities, democratic accountability, fiscal relays, and intergovernmental linkages” (Brenner 2009, p. 285). The delicate task of achieving capacity for common action able to transcend internal differences among malignant collaborators makes relevant the use of discourses that can unite coalitions and promote development (Gibbs and Kreuger 2007, Krueger and Gibbs 2008). It is relevant to re-emphasise that central tenet of vehicular ideas: They function as inclusive umbrellas under which political boundaries and conflicts can be transcended by providing a shelter or an arena where allegiances are produced (see also Cox and Béland 2013).

4. Process-tracing methodology and transdisciplinary co-production

The empirical material and analysis in this article are the result of a collaborative knowledge-production process initiated and organised by the Mistra Urban Futures (MUF) research centre. Our mode of transdisciplinary co-productive research can be defined as a boundary-spanning knowledge process characterised by mutual responsibility, joint inquiry and shared purpose (Polk 2015) between trained academic researchers, policy officials and others. Policy officials at the MUF initiated this research process with the purpose of analysing sustainability policies in order to inform decision-makers about the status of and options to chosen development trajectories. The transdisciplinary, co-productive process was conducted in 2010–2014 in three phases. The first phase consisted of a project initiated by the GR on multilevel governance (2010–2011), assigning a researcher as co-leader together with the GR chief planner. Here, co-leadership, joint data collection, and co-authorship of scientific papers and a policy report together with policy officials were the focus of co-production (Montin et al. 2014). In subsequent phases, a project initiated by the Gothenburg local interaction platform (GOLIP) of the MUF included the GR, the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland (a national authority), the City of Gothenburg and other key institutional actors in the GMA, represented through a reference group. The GOLIP appointed representatives from the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland to lead the project together with one researcher. The process and input from the reference group were managed through workshops. The co-production in the second phase was characterised by joint data collection and the co-authoring of a policy-oriented report (Cullberg et al. 2014).

The third and last phase consisted of an intensively designed case study of the GR governance process (2012–2013). Researchers were responsible for data collection during this phase, while the research questions were formulated, empirical data interpreted and the authoring of a policy report and scientific article was conducted collaboratively (Tahvilzadeh et al. 2014). Qualitative data were gathered in 30 semi-structured and recorded interviews with key actors – both politicians and public officials – and four rounds of focus groups of public officials comprising a total of about 60 individuals. Four consultation meetings, each involving roughly 40–90 politicians and public officials deliberating in workshops held for up to four hours in four different municipal councils, were observed. One conference, one meeting of the GR assembly (fullmäktigeförsamling) and one GR board meeting were observed on site.

5. What sustainability does: making the GMA governable

In this section, we explore the function of urban sustainability discourse in key GMA processes observed from 1998 to 2014. We illustrate the key processes, policy documents and knowledge bases of GMA political institutions, including investigative and research reports, in Table 1 and in a timeline (Table 2).

Table 1. The structuration and institutionalisation of urban sustainability discourse: Key policies, processes and knowledge bases in the GMA1998−2014.

Notes: Organisations involved in framing sustainability policies in the GMA.

GR: The Gothenburg Region Association of Local Authorities. Voluntary collaborative body of 13 municipalities. Organised through a council, board and planning office. VGR: Region of Västra Götaland. Constitutional local government body (landsting) consisting of 49 municipalities. Responsible for healthcare, culture and development. BRG: Business Region Gothenburg is responsible for developing trade and business in the 13 municipalities of the GR and is owned by the City of Gothenburg with a politically constituted board. HUR2050: Expert unit for deliberation on a long-term sustainable transportation infrastructure in the western region of Sweden. Initiated by the Swedish Transport Administration and the GR, involving 14 public organisations. Gbg: City of Gothenburg. Self-governing local government for 500,000 inhabitants. Finances and administrates schools, traffic and other urban planning and environmental policies. MUF: Mistra Urban Futures, Centre for Sustainable Urban Development. Knowledge co-production, financed by national research foundations, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Gothenburg, Gbg, GR, VGR and other private and public institutions.

Table 2. The emergence of urban sustainability discourse in Gothenburg: Key policies, processes and knowledge bases.

Year	Actor/Institution	Policy document	Process	Knowledge base/report	Explicit sustainability discourse?
1996	GR and 4 state transport authorities		Deliberations on the future of regional infrastructure		No: objective is to strengthen Gothenburg as a “growth engine” for the national economy
1998	GR	Transport strategy for the Gothenburg region and surrounding area			No, only ecological: mitigating carbon emissions of car transport, increasing transport accessibility through collective transportation
2002	Swedish Transport Administration, involving 14 public institutions		HUR2050 (Hållbar utveckling I regionen 2050)		Yes: sustainable regional development, focus on infrastructure
2002	GR		Consultation 1: On collaboration		No: citizen, ecological and competitive “powers”
200x	HUR2050			An environmental perspective: Environmental criteria’s for sustainability	Ecological discourse: mitigating carbon emissions
2004	GR		Consultation 2: How collaborate?		Yes: Social, ecologic and economic dimensions explicit
2005	HUR2050			An economic perspective: Sustainable development and future regional structure in the labour market of Gothenburg	Yes: Explicit infrastructure, economic growth and the labour market
200x	HUR2050			Future regional structure: Size and core structures	Yes: Focus on infrastructure
200x	HUR2050			Sustainable health and social development	Yes: Public health and social aspects of development
200x	HUR2050			Future images of a long-term sustainable Gothenburg region around year 2050	Yes: Focus on planning and infrastructure
2005	VGR			West Sweden and the new economic geography	No
2005	VGR	Vision Västra Götaland: A good life			Yes: Ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2005	GR		Consultation 3: Sustained growth		Yes: Ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2005	BRG			Growth in the Gothenburg region	No
2006	HUR2050	Future challenges: Together developing a sustainable region			Yes: ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2006	GR	Sustainable growth: Goals and strategies that focus on a sustainable regional structure			Yes: Ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2007	City of Gothenburg		S2020: An agenda for social sustainable development		Yes: Social sustainability
2008	City of Gothenburg	Budget	City council		Yes: Ecologic, social and economic sustainability
2008	GR		Consultation 4: Common responsibility		Yes: ecological, social and economic sustainability
2008	GR	The structural image for the Gothenburg region			Yes: focus on infrastructure
2009	GR			Sustainability models: What is sustainable development?	Yes: Ecological, economic and social sustainability
2009	City of Gothenburg/S2020			Poor and rich – Segregated city, mobility and the dynamics of segregation in Gothenburg 1990–2006	Yes: Social sustainability
2010	City of Gothenburg	A city for all, budget	City council		Yes: Ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2010	Mistra Urban Futures: Centre for Sustainable Development		A centre for research on sustainable urban development is established by multiple public and private institutions in Gothenburg		Yes: Ecologic, economic and social sustainability
2010	GR			Social sustainable development in the Gothenburg region – A knowledge base	Yes: Social sustainability
2010	City of Gothenburg	A city for all, budget and policy			Yes: ecological, economic and social sustainability
2012	GR		Consultation 5: Future challenges
2013	GR	Sustainable growth: Goals and strategies with focus on regional structure			Yes: ecological, economic and social sustainability
2014	Mistra Urban Futures			Low-carbon Gothenburg 2.0: Technological potentials and lifestyle changes	Yes: Ecological sustainability
2014	City of Gothenburg/S2020			Differences in life conditions and health in Gothenburg	Yes: social sustainability

Note: Milestones for Swedish politics of sustainability. Date, Milestone; 1998, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Investment Programmes; 1999, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental objectives; 2001, Swedish Ministry of the Environment, Sweden’s National Strategy for; Sustainable Development; 2003, Sverige, En hållbar framtid i sikte SOU 2003:31 (Sweden, A sustainable future in sight); 2005, Sverige, Strategiska utmaningar - En vidareutveckling av svensk strategi för hållbar utveckling (Sweden, Strategic challenges: A further development of Sweden’s national strategy for sustainable development); 2007, Sweden, Regional development and growth programmes 2007–2013; 2012, Sverige, Delegationen för hållbara städer, Förslag till fortsatt arbete för hållbar stadsutveckling (Delegation for sustainable cities. Suggestions for continued work for sustainable urban development, Sweden); 2014, Sverige, En nationell strategi för hållbar regional tillväxt och attraktionskraft 2015–2020 (Sweden, A national strategy for sustainable regional growth and attractiveness).

From 2006 on, the urban sustainability discourse outrivalled the traditional “city of solidarity” storyline that gave meaning to the post-war development aspirations of Gothenburg. As a central backdrop to the emergence of the sustainability discourse lay the historical tensions between the City of Gothenburg and its municipal neighbours. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rapid growth of Gothenburg was based on transport and shipyard manufacturing industries with a peak in the end of 1960s. The population expanded vastly and, by procuring surrounding land and incorporating smaller municipalities, the city made place for industrial facilities and housing for the working-class population between 1950 and1970. This housing consisted mainly of large-scale modernist rental apartments in the outskirt areas, tied to the city by an expanding tram and bus system. At the same time, several worn-down working-class neighbourhoods in the inner city were demolished (Holgersson et al. 2010). The slow rate of property development in the inner city, combined with other circumstances, caused the flight of the middle classes to single-family homes in garden estates in suburban municipalities. The small municipalities of the GMA grew rapidly, and the urban fabric was put under pressure by car-based commuting. The flight of middle-class tax revenues also put Gothenburg under fiscal pressure as the city had to care for large numbers of people who were elderly or unemployed in the shipyard crises. From the 1980s on, a growing number of initially unemployed foreign migrants settled in the poor, peripheral neighbourhoods of the city; this, coupled with a downsizing of public expenses and welfare support, caused a new racialised dimension of poverty and exclusion in the urban geography.

The tensions between the 13 GMA municipalities were significant, and attempts to manage regional infrastructural deficiencies were blocked. Post-war collaborative organisations in the GMA consisted of the Greater Gothenburg Consultative Committee (Storgöteborgs samarbetskommitté) and a regional planning association (regionplaneförbundet). The two organisations merged in 1974 to form the GR. During 1940–1994, the Gothenburg Suburbs Association (Göteborgs förorters förbund) served as an adversary association for the suburban municipalities. This last association was merged with GR in 1995, creating a symbol of a new collaboration ethos deliberately pushed through by the “strong man” of Gothenburg city, Göran Johansson, the Social Democratic chair of the board of Gothenburg city1988–1991 and 1994–2009 (Ronge 2002, GR 2005b).

Encouraging collaboration in the GR was one piece of the puzzle laid by the Social Democrats, with the support of the liberal and conservative opposition, in order to renew the urban infrastructure. The return of the middle classes to the city was and is a key quest. Planning politics in Gothenburg focused during the 1990s on urban densification, exclusive real-estate development and housing projects in the city centre. “The city of events” became a new slogan to accompany investment in tourism, arenas, festivals and the active promotion of service and knowledge industries such as the universities and facilities for information technology and telecoms (Sydow 2004, Jörnmark et al. 2006, Thörn 2011, Holgersson and Thörn 2014). The greening of the industrial city, with waterfront regeneration in old brownfield areas and crown-jewel planning projects, is estimated to attract investment up to SEK 1000 billion (Thörn 2012, Brorström 2015, Despotovic and Thörn 2015). However, the post-industrial development policies failed to manage the infrastructural inefficiencies of the sprawled and segregated urban fabric, traffic congestion, air pollution and social polarisation. By the mid-1990s, city, regional and national planning agencies started to search for compromises and solutions. Finding new collaborative political arenas was a central starting point.

The forming of the GR and the rescaling of Region Västra Götaland (VGR), an organisation responsible for healthcare, regional development and infrastructure in 49 member municipalities in western Sweden, were cornerstones of the collaborative ethos among the contentious political actors in the GMA. This was initially reinforced by state transport authorities that encouraged the municipalities and the VGR to unify as a local voice in national negotiations and investments in infrastructure. However, the governance arrangement needed a new narrative that would gather contentious key actors around a common agenda, a narrative open-ended enough to attract the positive affections sufficient to move things along. Next, we describe how sustainability discourse became a key mechanism in these cohesive aspirations, summarised in a timeline in Table 1 and a list of key documents in Table 2. We categorise three critical phases in which the discourse played an important role in making the GMA governable: (1) structuration (1998–2005), (2) institutionalisation (2006–2010) and (3) contestation (2010–2014).

5.1. Discourse structuration (1998–2006): producing cohesion

The GR devoted its first energies to the issue of transport infrastructure without using sustainability discourse as the raison d’être of collaboration. In 1999 a key policy document was produced called Transport strategy for the Gothenburg region with surrounding area (GR 1999). It emphasised infrastructure for societal development and ecological protection, not yet referred to as sustainability. The strategy was produced by a working group consisting of representatives of national governmental agencies: the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland, the Swedish Road Administration, the Swedish Rail Administration, the Göteborg Landvetter Airport, VGR, the Regional Secretary of Business, later renamed Business Region Gothenburg (BRG), and the City of Gothenburg Traffic and Public Transport Authority. The objective of this collaborative effort was to develop the infrastructure of West Sweden, because, “from a national point of view, an investment in the infrastructure of West Sweden is a way to use Gothenburg as a growth engine for strengthening the national economy” (GR 1999, p. 9). The strategy cohered with the national political framework of regional development at the time, which exclusively focused on economic growth (Hilding-Rydevik et al. 2011). At the end of the 1990s, the Swedish government started to mainstream sustainability discourse and regional partnerships for development, spurred, according to Hudson (2005, p. 317), by “the need for regions to take greater responsibility for promoting their own growth and well-being, and the need for national government to be able to control the direction of development so that regional aims do not conflict with national goals”.

In 2002, two key collaborative regional processes were launched to reach a joint agreement on an operationalised transport infrastructure plan. The structuration of sustainability discourse functioned as a strategy to gather key actors from infrastructural management agencies and municipal governance across jurisdictional boundaries around the table. First, a network of public officials and experts focusing on infrastructure was organised in a boundary-spanning ad hoc forum called HUR 2050, or Hållbar Utveckling i Regionen (Sustainable Development in the Region 2050). Second, consultation with all 13 municipal councils within the GMA was initiated and managed by the GR board and the BRG and administered by GR planning officials.

HUR 2050 was a forum for the technocracy in the region concerned with transport infrastructural development. It involved 14 state, regional and local public organisations (Polk 2010). HUR 2050 structured the key elements of sustainability discourse for the GMA. In 2002–2006, the network formed a consensus around a definition of sustainable urban development through workshops, investigations and reports on the ecologic, social and economic aspects of development. Polk (2011) interprets the purpose of HUR 2050 to be the establishment of “a platform for a more open dialogue on sustainable development”. However, the explicit purpose described by the forum itself was to “achieve a common idea about infrastructure development in the Gothenburg region in a long-term sustainable way” (HUR2050, 2005, p. 7). Infrastructural investment concerns thus preceded concern for sustainability. Focusing on the tensions surrounding the different interpretations of sustainability in the forum, the dominant storyline became sustainable growth promoting “market solutions as the most effective means for protecting the environment and ensuring the financial resources necessary for upholding the public sector” (Polk 2011, p. 491). Regional expansion became a central metaphor denoting growth in the regional population and making transport infrastructure efficient in order to integrate the regional labour market to meet the needs of industry. Future challenges, the concluding reports of HUR 2050 (2005), structured a growth-centred sustainability discourse, which resulted in, among other processes, two key outputs: A task force was formed, called K2020 (for public transit in the year 2020), that laid the foundations of a new transport planning strategy in the GR, and a policy strategy of “sustained growth” (GR 2006) gave the investments a contextual and ideological meaning.

Sustainability became the new catchword but was clearly understood in a growth-centred rationale, securing the support of the industrial sector (manifested by the West Sweden Chamber of Commerce) and the BRG, and was efficiently summarised in the report West Sweden and the new economic geography, co-authored with economic consultants and reseachers (VGR 2005b). The most significant impact of HUR 2050 was to produce a storyline and structure a discourse that could set things in motion. The forum did not have formal status in any governance process but became significantly influential.

The structuring of the sustainability discourse and the participation of municipal councils and elected politicians in the GMA were designed by the GR through “consultations”. In 2002 the GR initiated and arranged five rounds of deliberative workshops in each of the 13 municipal councils in the GMA. Local councillors discussed regional strategies in an evening session following an agenda set by the GR and BRG planning officials. The first round of consultations (2002–2003) lasted for 18 months, the second (2004) for 9, the third (2005) for 3, the fourth (2008) for only 2 months and the fifth (2012–2013) for 7 months. The design of the procedures was similar: Following an introduction of the specific agenda and themes of the current round by the politicians of the GR board and officials of the GR and BRG services, the local councillors were organised into discussion groups. The groups consisted of councillors from different political parties, and the discussions were semi-structured. The results of the deliberations were gathered in a final plenum and documented. This consultation process became central to the enabling of municipal cohesion in the overarching regional plan. After the 13 deliberations with each council, the results were processed in working groups of politicians from the GR assembly representing each municipality before being finally processed and decided on by the GR Board and the GR assembly and summarised in published reports. The average number of participants in each municipality was about 50, and an overall majority of the 1100 municipal councillors participated in the consultation process. The GR staff described the consultations as important for the anchorage of GR strategies and for the gathering of input from the local councils.¹

The only issue put forward in the first round of consultations was to discuss agendas for future collaboration, despite the fact that infrastructural issues dominated other ongoing collaborative initiatives in the region. The questions for deliberative exercises were laid out as open-ended, but the agendas the GR presented to the councillors clearly pointed to a need for agreement to develop the regional transport infrastructure towards three ends: competetiveness, the needs of citizens and the environment (GR 2004). Sustainability was not reiterated as the central objective. The collaborations were motivated with a traditional Social Democratic discourse of decreasing social inequality and clefts in the region. For the second round, arranged in 2004, “social structure” and “physical structure” were presented as top issues in the consultation agenda (GR 2005a). Here, sustainable development was elaborated as a comprehensive vision. The issue of “regional expansion” was more distinctly defined as population growth, the enlargement of the metropolitan labour market and the decreasing of commuting time by investment in housing and transport infrastructure. At this point, the contents of the strategy were still fuzzy. Then, a significant intervention by BRG officials concerned with economic development and infrastructure changed the course of both action and the structuration of the sustainability storyline in the GR.

It is at this point that the influence of HUR 2050 became pertinent. The report West Sweden and the new economic geography (VGR 2005b) was replicated by the BRG in a metropolitan-area version called Growth in the Gothenburg region – a basis for a strategy (BRG 2005) and given a key role. The purpose of this report was to “illustrate the fundamental growth mechanisms of modern metropolitan regions and to analyse their consequences for the growth agenda of the Gothenburg region” (BRG 2005, p. 3). According to GR planning officials and the chief analyst of BRG, who also participated in HUR 2050 as a consultant, the adoption of a sustainable-growth storyline and actual policy content with a focus on infrastructure (GR 2006) was a result of BRG lobbying. In 2004, BRG officials, a well-known urban-economy consultant “guru” and an economic researcher jointly authored the report and presented drafts every six months to the top-level political leadership of each GR municipality. There, the results were discussed, anchored and calibrated. Consultations with remaining politicians in the local councils were conducted in a highly rushed process of only three months by 2005. According to the BRG chief analyst, the winning concept was to show, with scientifically reinforced arguments, how larger regions that were adapted to the global competition between cities could enhance sustainable urban lifestyles, extend public commuting, improve public health and increase income.² These were the facts of the sustainable-growth storyline as it became institutionlised in 2006.

5.2. Discourse institutionalisation (2006–2010): setting things in motion

When the table was set and the coalition organised, the sustainable-growth storyline guided several significant policy processes to come. After HUR 2050 and three rounds of consultation with GR municipalities, urban sustainability discourse became institutionalised in all key political arenas. As the cohesive device, sustainability resulted in several action plans, that is, infrastructural agreements. Det goda livet (A Good Life) (VGR 2005a), VGR’s comprehensive strategy starting 2005, was motivated with a three-dimensional sustainability discourse. The philosophy of the good life was integrated with the GR Sustainable growth strategy document (2006, updated 2013) and served as a comprehensive plan operationalised in land-use agreements through the Structural illustration (GR 2008) for GR municipalities. The latter, processed in the GR, plans main corridors for the development of a regional commuting rail service, thereby safeguarding designated coastal areas, “green wedges” and the Göta älv river. The development projects in the city centre were initiated in old brownfield areas, and the West Swedish Agreement infrastructure-investment programme was set in motion (GR 2009a).

During the institutionalisation phase, the concept of sustainable urban development increased its dominance as a narrative in multiple political agendas and arenas. In 2008–2010, a national government delegation for sustainable cities was established. Its work contributed to the mainstreaming of urban sustainability discourse through knowledge production, collaborative networking between Swedish cities and the nationwide funding of several urban development projects. The City of Gothenburg hosted a number of projects described as innovative and sustainability-promoting, in particular in the new Rivercity districts of the Älvstaden area. The hegemonic status of sustainability discourse emerged incrementally, but perhaps the most noteworthy shift was the framing of the City of Gothenburg’s 2008 budget by Social Democrats and the Green party and the new general plan formulated in 2009. Debates in the institutionalisation phase tended to take sustainability for granted as a common good, yet tensions around the concept were evident in terms of whether to privilege the social, economic or ecologic dimension. In 2007 the City of Gothenburg established an expert unit called S2020 (social sustainability in the year 2020) with the mission to elaborate and frame issues of social sustainability in the city agenda as a way to strengthen the social dimensions.

After the sustainable-growth storyline had become dominant in GR narratives, two investigations were initiated to elucidate how the concept of sustainable development should be understood, modelled and elaborated (GR 2009b, 2010). Thus, after the structuration and institutionalisation of the urban sustainable development discourse, GR planning officials provided a publicly available analysis of what the concept should mean for the GMA. Meanwhile, infrastructural investment plans were set in motion and the contentious actors of the GMA agreed upon a common agenda for collaboration in order to develop the region. “To grow is sustainable” is the way several planners framed it in the GR.³ However, the agreement became highly contested in public debates and the local councils when congestion charges were implemented in the City of Gothenburg.

5.3. The contentious phase 2010–2014: the cohesive functions of sustainable growth

The sustainable-growth storyline was based on the narrative that the GMA could have it all: ecological safeguarding, social cohesion and economic growth through investment in transport infrastructure and housing development. Negotiation in expert forums and deliberation with local councillors structured and institutionalised the discourse of sustainable urban development, privileging infrastructure investments and economic growth without any major political party or other fractional agonism. Yet the coalition failed to anticipate citizen reaction when plans to finance the infrastructural investment, in particular congestion charges, were implemented.

The City of Stockholm implemented congestion charges in 2007 through a referendum. In Gothenburg, the contentious metropolitan deadlock was an impediment until the GR and VGR were formed and the sustainability discourse was structured and institutionalised. This seemingly offered a win–win solution for those who demanded more road infrastructure and those who asked for greater investment in public transport (Hysing et al. 2015). The participation of roughly 1000 lay politicians in the 13 local councils was managed as a way to anchor GR strategies in an indirect form of representative democratic governance dominated by the technocracy, rather than opening the strategic deliberations to direct citizen influence. The GR consultations did not trigger any major party-political conflicts. However, once the congestion charges were put into effect in 2013, the infrastructural plan became rapidly politicised in the media, and new protest movements were formed. Half of the budget (SEK 17 billion) for infrastructure investment was to be provided by the national government and the major part of the other half (SEK 14 billion) financed via congestion charges.

Following the 2010 elections, the implementation of congestion charges and eventually the underground train tunnel, called the West Link Project, became controversial. The emergence of a protest movement contesting congestion charges and promoting automobility values became the major threat to the stability of the discourse coalition. The contestation was not based on whether the project was sustainable or not, however. In 2010 a protest party called Vägvalet (Road choice) made it into Gothenburg City Council with 5.4% of the electorate’s votes; in some city districts, it received as much as 14.0%. A petition supported by a local tabloid and signed by 28,000 individuals managed to get Gothenburg City Council to arrange a public referendum on the congestion charges under the Swedish Local Government Act. A fraction of the conservative Moderate Party members shifted position – despite the fact that the chair of the GR board of directors from 2006 on chaired the Moderate Party in Gothenburg City Council – and the City Council approved in 2013 the referendum for September 2014. The result was that 57% of the electorate voted no, with a turnout rate of 74%. Local referendums in Sweden are only consultative, and the City Council decided to go through with the GR plans despite the negative results. This was the first time the coalition, formed on the basis of sustainability discourse, was challenged by a competing coalition concerned with neither growth, social equity, nor the environment, but rather financial impediments to automobility. The sustainable-growth storyline became a way to hold the actors and investment agreements intact throughout the conflict. The coalition also stayed intact when experts and technocrats began to challenge the rationale of the investment package in terms of construction and economic values, especially concerning the West Link tunnel. A dynamic debate in the local paper displayed a unified storyline around sustainable growth among all major parties – motivating infrastructure investment with arguments promoting economic growth, environmental protection and regional expansion.

By 2012, the storyline and the policies framed were becoming increasingly questioned from within institutions engaged in the sustainable urban development discourse, but with a critical perspective on growth-centred ideologies. Returning to the fifth round of consultation, which led to the update of the Sustainable growth strategy without any major revisions (GR 2013a), six years of mediatised environmental debate and the emergence of a social sustainability discourse from within public institutions became a challenge to the dominant storyline (GR 2012a). Even the GR chair called the strategy “anorectic” in its environmental dimension and said the planners at the GR intentionally pushed environmental and social issues (climate change, segregation, etc.) onto the agenda (GR 2012b). Still, the GR kept a growth-centred optimistic narrative on the agenda. In reviewing the outcome of growth and regional-expansion strategies since 2006, the BRG chief analyst found that the GMA had overachieved even BRG ambitions. He pushed the GR staff to aim for still higher growth numbers in terms of population and private sector investments.⁴ The fifth consultation round (2012–2013) reinforced the growth-centred storyline with a success narrative: Based on the observations of the last round of GR consultations, in the beginning of each session in the municipalities, the GR chief planning official said, “Things are working out really well; we have been more effective than aimed for”.

Contesting perspectives were present on the growth agenda. They were raised in public debates and intra-institutional forums of the GMA. The main argument of the critical voices was that the issues of carbon emission cutbacks and social equality were not prioritised (GR 2013b, 2013c). These actors were remarkably frank about their dissent with the established storylines:

The precondition of growth was never discussed but rather implicitly decided: The one who doesn’t grow dies. In recent years we have seen solid economic and other research efforts showing that sustainable development is no longer a crazy utopia and that we perhaps should do other things than strive for infinite growth. (Our translation, policy official in a GR municipality, focus group interview 23 August 2013)

From 2010 on, the critical coalition became more structured and found several pockets of resistance for deliberating knowledge and strategies. For these critics in the organisation, the updated strategy was a disappointment. Not only did it reinforce the growth narrative and measures, but it also further watered down the social dimension. The establishment of the MUF as a co-productive research centre appeared to be an important factor in the structuring of a critical voice that still works in the shadow of the sustainability coalition. While the growth-centred coalition tended to use the research centre as a confirmatory instrument and a showroom of urban densification and development projects, the critical coalition found a significant institution for transdisciplinary deliberation and contemplation on ecological and social aspects of development. The tension between the coalitions was sometimes more overt. Critical voices experienced exclusion in the institutional setting in terms of how the agenda was sensitised to their concerns of climate crisis and social polarisation.

If we regard the critical voices, mainly experts on social and environmental issues, as a coalition that started to structure a different storyline featuring climate-smart citizens and slogans such as “inequality kills”, they are still too fragmented as a set of contentious scientists, professionals and politicians to gain influence in the key institutions of the GMA. However, this scattered coalition has achieved a number of policy reformulations challenging the sustainable-growth storyline. A new climate strategy for the City of Gothenburg launched in 2014 took into account the consumption perspective of carbon emissions and the global footprint of the city, and set up consumption patterns and lifestyle issues as a matter of city policy objectives (Göteborg 2014a). In a similar way, City of Gothenburg investigations that found solid evidence of growing social inequality and racialised segregation framed issues of social polarisation more distinctly on the political agenda (Göteborg 2014b). The challenge remains for the critical coalition to unify and structure a storyline with a perspective on economic growth that can unite ecological protection and social-equality objectives and actors. So far, what sustainability discourse has done is to neutralise these interests, demands and projects in order to privilege infrastructural development projects.

6. Conclusion: what is the future of urban sustainability policies?

In this article, we have described and discussed why paradoxical sustainability policies reign over urban development ambitions. We have explored the function of sustainability discourse by investigating how it works as a linguistic mechanism and coalition-building instrument, or a vehicular idea, which moves things forward for the governing elites and technocracy engaged in infrastructural development. While a number of political institutions and universities engaged in sustainability discourse in the GMA were preoccupied with discussing what sustainability really is, could or should be, a number of infrastructural technocrats and regional economists found a way to use the discourse to bring about a historical infrastructural investment agreement among contentious actors to the advantage of economic-growth values. The function of sustainability discourse in our case study crystallised into the storyline of sustainable growth and the metaphor of regional expansion. It is an open-ended affectionate discourse that has thus far enabled cohesive and collaborative strategies among a number of contentious actors who sought win–win solutions. Sustainability politics fix dilemmas by enabling collaborative governance for infrastructural investment and neutralising demands put forward within the institutional setting. Critical voices are included in collaborative governance processes, but critical perspectives on growing carbon consumption and social polarisation are framed in fuzzy objectives and decoupled into non-existent policy measures.

Concluding that economic-growth policies overshadow ecological safeguarding and social equity concerns in the politics of urban development and sustainability policies is hardly surprising. Our results contribute further insight into how and why sustainability discourse remains hegemonic by displaying its functions as a linguistic and ideological political mechanism. Sustainability is everything and nothing; it is only under certain circumstances that it becomes a navigating agent in the politics of urban development. In the GMA, the circumstance that enabled the hegemony of sustainability and the institutionalisation of growth-oriented policies was the need to bring contentious actors back to the negotiation table in order to meet the demands put forward by the national government and the needs of the business sector of the region. What urban sustainable development discourse accomplished and continues to accomplish in Gothenburg is highly tangible, despite the complex, fuzzy and varying meanings of sustainability. What sustainability means depends on who you ask in the GMA, but what it promised – the facts told by the narrative of sustainable growth – is that you can have it all: economic growth, ecological protection and social cohesion.

So what is the future of sustainability discourse in urban development, given the case of Gothenburg? If we consider the tensions emerging from the policy output and outcomes of the sustainable-growth storyline since 2010, we might see two possible directions for sustainability discourse. One possible development trajectory is, of course, status quo. Given that the sustainability concept still has the power to neutralise any major contentious intra-institutional or civil-society mutiny against the institutional order, arrangements and distribution of resources, there is good reason to believe that the present scattered flora of critical coalitions can be compromised. Despite the radical critique of economic-growth values that exists in the development-policy institutions of the GMA, no explicit coalition has been formed with a storyline that can seriously compete with the hegemony of sustainable growth. This could be related not only to the wide range of social and political dispositions of the diffused radical voices, but also to the fact that the sustainability narrative neutralises the radical critique by redistributing enough attention and resources to combat mutiny. Being cynical, one could perceive the establishment of a co-productive research centre for knowledge in sustainable urban development as one such neutralising act. While critical voices investigate what sustainability is, could or should be, they are detached from the workshops where the actual investment decisions are being made, and the reports, though published, are politely recognised and conveniently hidden in bookcases.

Sustainability discourse did not make any effective climate or environmental protection policies possible, nor did it have clout enough to combat rampant social inequalities. In fact, it could even have left the city worse off compared to the starting point. The other possible scenario could be that the sustainability fix loses its cohesive power because of the ideological tension emanating from the contradiction in the everyday lives of the region’s inhabitants. Climate change and social inequality will be tangible in everyday life and may well give rise to social movements and spur causes within a broad array of ideologies on the urban political landscape. While right-wing populism and nationalist neofascist movements are prominent new political actors targeting immigration and Islam as the causes of economic and social crisis in Swedish cities at the moment, discontent coalitions concerned with social injustice and the inability to handle environmental degradation have the potential to become significant. If these movements challenge the sustainable-growth storyline fiercely enough, the coalition upholding its dominance could resolve into a number of more distinctly politicised coalitions. Sustainability would have lost its most important capacity, and the search for a new narrative would mark the political landscape.

What, then, can co-productive research processes achieve, given these two loosely sketched trajectories of urban sustainable development discourse? Knowledge production involving both researchers and policy officials could provide informed reflection on the status, integrated values, theories and options of existent policy infrastructures. The production of such reflective knowledge should not only use the appropriate methodology to consider the outcomes of policy, but also make explicit the ideological dimension in framing policies. Using sustainability, democracy, justice or any other normative narrative to frame and give meaning to urban development policies will hardly be free of politics, even if their intended use is to neutralise immanent conflicts and contradictions in the governance of social development, given existing structures for the distribution of values and resources. The transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge could elucidate these contradictions. It could inform a strategy for contesting existent development trajectories and urging policy-makers to make transparent the options that are available and the baseline inquiries on which policies rest. The way forward could be in shaping new forums for deliberation and governance in which values other than economic growth can be structured into comprehensive storylines with the power to mobilise the contentious other.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Governance and Policy for Sustainbility project team and the two anonymous reviewers for comments which significantly improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Nazem Tahvilzadeh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1581-4731

Stig Montin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4743-9083

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mistra Urban Futures.

Notes

1. Interview with two GR planning officials 4 October 2013.

2. Interview chief analyst BRG 18 March 2014.

3. Focus-group interview with the chief planners of the GR member municipalities 13 December 2013.

4. Interview chief analyst BRG 18 March 2014.