Territoriell Resiliens och Grön Omställning i Norra Sverige
The project aims to further develop and apply a framework for territorial resilience that was constructed in the ESPON TERRES project to the green industrial transition in northern Sweden, with a particular focus on Norrbotten and Västerbotten. Its primary objective is to assess how the regions’ capacities to manage long-term societal transformations are evolving — especially their absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities — in a context characterised by rapid reindustrialisation and large-scale climate investments.
To achieve this, the project will compile and analyse findings from regional workshops and interviews, complemented by document studies and content analysis. It will also suggest a set of indicators tailored to the Swedish context. The outcome will be a report providing tools to strengthen governance, coordination, and institutional capacity throughout the transition process.
Northern Sweden is currently experiencing an unprecedented “positive shock” driven by the rapid green industrial shift. This development places significant demands on governance, cross-level coordination, and institutional readiness, while many existing structures and tools were designed to address decline rather than accelerated growth. Ambiguities in roles and responsibilities, limited local autonomy, weak vertical and horizontal cooperation, and insufficient inclusion of societal actors risk undermining a just and effective transition.
The project therefore seeks to identify the conditions that can strengthen regional resilience and offer public actors improved means of addressing these complex governance and coordination challenges.
Expected outputs include a report presenting an indicator and analytical framework for territorial resilience aimed at improving governance and coordination in the green transition in northern Sweden. By equipping municipalities, regions, and national agencies with tools for managing complex change processes, the project will contribute to enhanced institutional capacity, improved governance, and more inclusive decision-making. In the longer term, this is expected to increase the regions’ ability to withstand future societal transformations and to support a just and sustainable development pathway. The insights generated may also inspire other European regions undergoing similar transitions.
