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Taking as its starting premise that we have a politics of space because space is political at the level of ontology, this article investigates how the governing of regional development is guided by a set of prominent political rationalities that revolve around the notions of competition and competitiveness. To this end, I mobilise the Foucauldian framework of governmentality to provide empirical illustrations drawn from a 5-year long research project concerning globalisation in Swedish sub-national regions. These illustrations show how regions are governed through rationalities that stress adaptability, attraction, environment and sustainability as well as leadership in order to prevail in their inevitable competition for vital resources. I argue that as these chains of rationale are put into motion in the contemporary politics of space, they not only promote specific and particular ways of developing regions, but also displace certain practices and objects from the realm of the political to the realm of a natural order. I therefore conclude that current expressions of the politics of space have strong tendencies to deny its own political foundations. Instead, competition and competitiveness are inscribed as naturally occurring features in social relations, thereby elevating their importance in the creation of new sub-national spaces.

Taking as its starting premise that we have a politics of space because space is political at the level of ontology, this article investigates how the governing of regional development is guided by a set of prominent political rationalities that revolve around the notions of competition and competitiveness. To this end, I mobilise the Foucauldian framework of governmentality to provide empirical illustrations drawn from a 5-year long research project concerning globalisation in Swedish sub-national regions. These illustrations show how regions are governed through rationalities that stress adaptability, attraction, environment and sustainability as well as leadership in order to prevail in their inevitable competition for vital resources. I argue that as these chains of rationale are put into motion in the contemporary politics of space, they not only promote specific and particular ways of developing regions, but also displace certain practices and objects from the realm of the political to the realm of a natural order. I therefore conclude that current expressions of the politics of space have strong tendencies to deny its own political foundations. Instead, competition and competitiveness are inscribed as naturally occurring features in social relations, thereby elevating their importance in the creation of new sub-national spaces.

The context of sub-national regions in Sweden is used to illustrate how rankings and indices operate as part of contemporary governing of space and territory. An empirical study of an index designed to measure the innovative capacity of these regions is presented to illustrate how such numerical devices are invoked as part of policy by providing policy-makers with a means to define reality, guide strategy and legitimize certain actions. Drawing on both the literatures of governmentality and the sociology of quantification, the construction of the index and its deployment into politics are examined with a focus on the performative aspects of mobilizing such technologies in governing. The analysis shows how an instrument intended as a learning tool for regions and regional policy-makers turns into a device through which power operates in the processes of marking, grading and commensuration, in turn reinforcing established orders among the regions. Following from this, it is found that such numerical devices are important governmental technologies that help relay and institute political rationalities. Therefore, they should be considered more carefully in any analysis of discourses of regional development, which is a field permeated by rationalities of innovation and competitiveness.

This thesis explores two related purposes. First, it theoretically investigates how the broad literature on globalization is nested in debates concerning the nature of concepts such as space and territory. When doing so, it suggests that studies of globalization can be advanced by escaping territorialist understandings where the nation state is reproduced as a natural arena appropriate for studying all aspects of 'the social'. The theoretical part of the thesis is used as a basis for articulating a framework for empirical studies that rest upon a conceptual grammar fashioned through a combination of so called assemblage thinking and governmentality analysis. This framework is then put to work as the second, empirical, purpose of the thesis is pursued. More precisely this means that the governance of Swedish regional development is analyzed as an assemblage of discourses, practices and subjects where (re)production of globalization occurs. The (re)production of globalization is studied in three interrelated case studies, all based on a corpus of 81 documents pertaining to the governance of Swedish regional development. By paying attention to how power operates in terms of political rationalities, governmental technologies and the production of social actors, the thesis shows how notions of a perpetual and omnipresent global competition marks the assemblage with particularly salient modes of rationale. Specifically, entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity are represented as the primary means for becoming competitive in the age of globalization, and it is shown here how this have inclusionary and exclusionary effects in terms of desired social actors throughout Swedish regions. The thesis then ends with a concluding chapter where the current regimes of regional development are identified as complex forms of neoliberal rule with far reaching effects for democratic principles and practices. ; In an age often understood as globalized, questions of space and territory are pushed to the forefront of political rule. This thesis explores how contemporary regimes of governing are not only practices of 'state craft', but also 'space craft' as power operates in relation to perpetual and encompassing notions of global competition among states, regions and subjects. In the thesis a conceptual grammar based on so called assemblage thinking and governmentality studies is put forward in order to investigate how globalization is articulated as a problem for governing regional development in Sweden. It is shown how this is nested in specific political rationalities and governmental technologies that emerge in attempts to produce competitiveness. By approaching the governance of regional development as an assemblage, a vibrant junction of discourses, practices and subjects, the thesis shows how political analysis can rid it self from notions of methodological nationalism, or in other words, a reification of the nation-state as the most appropriate scale for the study of social relations. When doing so it also highlights how complex forms of neoliberal rule lies at the heart of regional development, posing challenges for democratic principles and practices throughout the world.

How we choose to utilize digital technology has the potential to undermine the healthy functioning of democratic systems. Surveillance practices such as the tracking, collection and profiling of our online and real-world behavior pose a direct challenge to privacy rights and democratic freedoms such as fairness and anti-discrimination. This paper aims to understand how the GDPR represents risk and, in turn, how that representation shapes protection. Using Carol Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to Be?' (WPR) approach to policy analysis, we illustrate how the GDPR's dual aims of protecting both people and the free flow of personal data exist in a state of tension and that the GDPR's framing of 'public interest' privileges economic growth over individual rights. Also problematic is the assumption that people are sufficiently informed to exercise control over their data, yet are being asked to agree to practices which may undermine that very autonomy.

In this article, we conduct a governmentality analysis of Swedish public procurement in order to show how the notion of sustainability is constructed in this circumstance. We argue that the mainstream approach to sustainability policy in most countries lies within capitalist market rationalities, thus making it crucial to study how such rationalities shape and represent the problems of unsustainability and how these "problems" limit the possibilities for politics and policy in practice. Furthermore, public procurement is a central instrument through which these rationalities are realised and maintained. Thus, the purpose is to examine how problems of unsustainability are represented through public procurement policy and the effects they constitute for the politics of sustainability. To this end we mobilise the Foucauldian based "what's the problem represented to be" approach. As data, we use policy documents published with respect to public procurement in Sweden. Our findings show that the dominant problem representation constructs unsustainability as a market failure, limiting the possibilities for politics and policies of sustainability in several ways. This includes premising sustainability upon the continued expansion of capitalism; constituting the agents of change as apolitical actors; making sustainability a voluntary ambition for the procuring organisations; and constructing the legitimate claim to earth's resources and sinks as a matter of purchasing power, with important implications for environmental justice. However, our analysis also shows a tension in the material creating openings for a politicisation of the representations of sustainability.

Swedish local government plays a central role in welfare production, providing some of the most crucial services to citizens. However, over the last decades there have been significant changes in how local governments are governed and how services are implemented. In many cases, these changes entail the promotion of rationalities and technologies associated with market-oriented principles and values as the primary means to providing welfare services. A central feature in this is public procurement. This phenomenon has been surprisingly absent from scholarly work that focuses on marketisation and the politics of public sector reform in Sweden. In this article, we present a case study based on interviews with actors involved in public procurement in Swedish local government. We provide insights into how public procurement sustains and expands the rationalities of marketisation. We conclude that the importance of public procurement has expanded, producing organisational changes and, perhaps most importantly, we are witnessing changes in the role of civil servants in Swedish public administration.

Swedish local government plays a central role in welfare production, providing some of the most crucial services to citizens. However, over the last decades there have been significant changes in how local governments are governed and how services are implemented. In many cases, these changes entail the promotion of rationalities and technologies associated with market-oriented principles and values as the primary means to providing welfare services. A central feature in this is public procurement. This phenomenon has been surprisingly absent from scholarly work that focuses on marketisation and the politics of public sector reform in Sweden. In this article, we present a case study based on interviews with actors involved in public procurement in Swedish local government. We provide insights into how public procurement sustains and expands the rationalities of marketisation. We conclude that the importance of public procurement has expanded, producing organisational changes and, perhaps most importantly, we are witnessing changes in the role of civil servants in Swedish public administration.

AbstractIn this paper, we develop an approach for analyzing the increasingly important strand of research that deals with automated systems of governing. Such systems, which figure prominently in public policy and regulation, are designed to utilize the rapid advancement in computer technology, like artificial intelligence, with the purpose of governing something or someone. Drawing on a large sample of articles we present a comprehensive analysis of scholarly works where these systems are studied as political, rather than neutral, instruments of governing. We find that the current state of the art articulates the politics of automated systems of governing in three ways. Namely, as part of ontological, epistemological and ideological questions. We conclude that future research should investigate the complex forms of marketization nested in these systems, that it should move from theoretical examples to detailed empirical studies and that political science should get more involved with the issue.

AbstractOver the past few decades, Sweden has established itself as a "world leader" in gender equality. Alongside this development, Swedish politicians have also initiated ambitious plans that aim to establish the country as "world class" in terms of digitalization. International research shows that women and racialized groups are in a minority in the design processes, that AI facial recognition systems are built with white male faces as the norm, and that digital tools replicate racial injustices. In this paper, we are interested in if, and if so how, gender equality is articulated and thus filled with meaning in national policies on AI and digitalization. The overall aim is to discuss the potential of gender (equality) mainstreaming to challenge systems of privilege in the implementation of AI systems in the public sector. The paper analyses how gender equality is filled with meaning in national policy documents on AI and gender equality. The main findings show that gender equality is turned into a question of lack of knowledge and information, which in turn blocks out an understanding of gender equality as something that is related to gendered power relations.

The aim of this article is to examine trends of democratic backsliding associated with the long standing reform work on regional institutions and policies in Sweden. To this end, democratic backsliding is conceptualized in a different manner compared to conventional understandings. By doing so, the article highlights a missing aspect in the research on democratic backsliding that concerns how well-intended reforms designed to strengthen democratic institutions can also harbor non-democratic consequences. In Sweden, a new political arena was created when the former county councils were transformed into so-called called regions in 2019. As part of this, the regions have been assigned responsibility for both health care and regional development planning. The overall research problem to be analyzed in this article focuses on the relations between the policy objectives for democracy and regionalist ideas of economic growth that both were central concerns in the reform processes. The results highlight how the governing rationalities in the regional reform processes have changed during the period between 1990 and 2020. The original conception of creating a mini-version of a liberal and representative democracy have turned into a form of democratic backsliding privileging economic goals. The economic rationalities that permeate the political sphere today close the space for articulated different interests and opinions-a dimension that we argue is crucial for any democratic society. We draw two main conclusions: First that the neoliberal aspect of governing is missing in the analysis of democracy at the regional level, resulting in a descriptive discussion of democracy that tend to ignore the effects of the particularly strong emphasis on economic growth. Secondly, that there is a lack of a discussion on democracy that takes the regional level into account, i.e., that the sub-national level should be regarded and thus discussed as a distinctive level of democracy.

Sustainability and sustainable development are political and essentially contested social phenomena. Despite this ambiguity, they continue to hold a central position as apolitical concepts in much of social science and policy making. In Europe, public procurement is increasingly used as a tool to reach sustainability, a fact that actualizes an inherent tension between politically charged objectives on the one hand, and technological processes and market logics on the other. Therefore, in this article, we investigate this tension by studying policies relating to sustainable public procurement of the built environment in the EU. We argue that governing any policy domain entails the construction and representation of particular policy problems. Hence, we focus on how the 'problems' of sustainable public procurement are represented in EU policy guidance and best practice documents. Our analysis shows that these central policy documents are dominated by a problem representation where unsustainability is constructed as technical design flaws and market failure. This has the primary effect that it renders sustainable development as, primarily, a technical issue, and beyond politics. Therefore, we conclude that current policy reproduces 'weak' forms of sustainable development, where the practice is depoliticized and premised upon continued growth and innovation.