Lesson learned? : A study of Sweden’s post-crisis learning after the fire in Västmanland 2014

The world is facing an increase in natural disasters due to climate change, and Sweden is no exception. In the past 10 years Sweden has endured two large forest fires which devastated both land and property and which had huge financial impacts on society. Learning from such disasters is an important task for the crisis management system since learning is vital to be able to both prevent, prepare for, and manage new disasters. By conducting a qualitative in-depth analysis of the post-crisis learning process after the forest fire in 2014, this study aims to examine how actors learn from disasters as well as provide insight into the post-crisis organisational learning process in general. The actions of the Swedish Government and Parliament is evaluated by linking organisational learning to policy change, in such that for learning in the post-crisis management to have happened, the actor needs to have both identified lessons from the disaster, as well as implemented these into policy. In this study a text analysis is conducted on the two inquiries ordered by the Government after the fire to determine the “lessons identified”, and a plethora of government documents is analysed to ascertain whether the lessons identified have been acted upon and implemented into policy. It was found that the inquiries identified many valuable lessons, and that the authorities in most cases had implemented, or tried to implement, the lessons into policy. However, the protracted process of implementation, which led to some measures not being fully implemented until 2021, allowed new fires to occur before the issues were remedied. It is therefore argued that the efficiency of the Swedish Government’s post-crisis learning process should perhaps be questioned.