Strategiska samarbeten – roller, relationer och risker i mellankommunala samarbeten

Abstract

In the Swedish public sector, there is an ongoing strategic discussion about the need for larger contexts. These discussions often point in one direction—more collaboration between municipalities. Strategic collaborations are based on the idea that there are many benefits to creating larger operational entities: reduced vulnerability, secured competence supply, increased cost-efficiency, and improved quality. These benefits are welcomed by municipalities in Sweden, especially the smaller ones that struggle to recruit competent staff and maintain good public services. Smaller municipalities are often considered vulnerable.

Strategic collaborations are interesting from a governance perspective because they challenge hierarchical structures. Therefore, a relevant question to ask is: how are these types of collaborations governed? In the literature on inter-organizational relationship, several researchers have focused on this overarching question. A large portion of the literature has addressed the question using reductionist approaches. They have both examined the risks and problems that exist and used established governance techniques to explain how collaborations are managed and controlled. However, several researchers, including myself, have pointed out the importance of answering the question with approaches that focus on the relationships between actors. I align with the group of researchers who have emphasized that governance is a process and something that must be created and maintained within a relationship. By focusing on concepts from market creation theories, I assume that actors in the relationships need to agree on several aspects (such as goals, roles, what services to deliver, and at what cost) for the relationships in the collaboration to function.

In this dissertation, I show the expectations associated with collaborations, as well as how roles are created and formed, but I also highlight what actors do to create stability and how relationships are destabilized. I demonstrate how actors engage in activities of refinement, re-establishment, and repair to stabilize the relationship. I also highlight several conflicts that can be understood in terms of strategification, standardization, and iteration. A central conclusion of the dissertation is that roles cannot be organized straightforwardly and therefore struggle to achieve stability. This is because they need to maintain and negotiate interfaces. Furthermore, the dissertation shows that it is easy for actors to establish contracts and shared understandings of roles, overarching goals, and resource distribution models. However, it becomes apparent that much smaller, detail-oriented issues cause all of this to be reconsidered. When asked why these relationships are so challenging to govern and control, one answer is that detailed issues often lead to conflicts when they are tied to more strategic directions.