Sustainable Citizenship on the Local Level in Sweden: Towards an Understanding for How to Resolve Tensions Between Social, Economic, and Ecological Sustainability

This paper aims to illuminate the challenges in capacitating lifestyles that are at once socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable. Although these three spheres of sustainability are inherently linked not least by the finite resources of the planet, they are often discussed in isolation and thus the tensions between each type of sustainability are rarely addressed in an explicit manner. Starting from the perspective of citizenship as a lived experience, the paper theorizes how regular people advance or hinder sustainability in their everyday lives. To approach this research agenda empirically, the paper analyzes the policy and regulatory environment on the federal and local levels in Sweden in order to gain insight into how much these structures incentivize people to care, work, and consume in a sustainable manner.

The literature has already expounded to a large degree on how to address sustainability dilemmas intrinsic to each social role: social sustainability depends on enabling care-giving, economic sustainability depends on enabling labor market participation, and ecological sustainability depends on responsible consumerism. Although the best way to promote each sphere of sustainability remains debated, even less is known about how to capacitate all three roles simultaneously in a sustainable manner. What implications do best practices regarding social sustainability hold for ecological sustainability? How do best practices to address ecological sustainability influence economic sustainability? And so on. Although these questions have been taken up by various research communities such as de-growth and social investment, much more attention is needed to delineate how lifestyles can become truly sustainable in the future. An analysis of Swedish policies on the local level promises to deepen our theoretical and empirical understanding of how to resolve tensions between social, economic, and ecological sustainability.