Connecting reason to power: Assessments, learning, and environmental policy integration in Swedish energy policy

The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to understanding what makes a policymaking system better at integrating sustainability concerns into its processes. Three questions are in focus. First, how can policy integration be understood analytically and what is its actual status in sector policy? Second, what conditions have facilitated or constrained policy integration? Third, how should institutions and assessment systems be set up to enhance the potential for policy integration as a learning process? The thesis presents a framework for analysing environmental policy integration as a policy-learning process in which sectors reframe their understanding of key problems, objectives, and strategies towards sustainable development. This framework combines theoretical perspectives such as policy networks, learning, institutionalism, and knowledge-to-policy studies. The empirical study analyses patterns of policy learning and policy integration in Swedish energy policymaking processes, tracing these processes and their outcomes in different rounds and stages of policy formation over the last two decades. The development of nuclear and climate policy in Sweden is examined and related to institutional rules and assessments. According to this analysis policy learning occurs when there is a moderate level of interest conflict with an international stream pushing the agenda; and for processes with leadership from the sector mainstream that lends credibility and trust to the process and that focus on building up joint-problem understandings and making explicit goal conflicts and policy dilemmas. Finally, a practical policy-analytic application is performed to understand how factors believed to contribute to policy learning are represented in real applications of existing assessment methods. The exercise confirms that an understanding of the decision-making context is necessary as an integral part of the assessment.Technology, Policy and Managemen