Between Reform and Reality : Structural change and the conditions for collaboration in Swedish Total Defence

Sammanfattning

The deteriorating security situation in Europe has accelerated the reconstruction of Swedish total defence, leading to structural changes, including the 2022 structural reform and Sweden's accession to NATO in 2024. This thesis examines how structural reform affects the conditions for civil-military collaboration within Swedish total defence, focusing on how changes in the systemic context inhibit or stimulate the drivers of collaboration for host-nation support in Civil Defence Region East. Using Emerson and Nabatchi's (2015) Collaborative Governance Regimes framework, an abductive approach was employed, combining deductive thematic analysis based on the theoretical framework with inductively emerging themes from the empirical material. Data was collected through eight semi-structured interviews with civilian and military actors working within the geographical area. The results reveal that structural reform affects the conditions for collaboration in a complex way, simultaneously creating both enabling and constraining conditions. While the reform clarified some roles and responsibilities and gave rise to initiating leaders, it also introduced geographical misalignments and increased demands without resolving the fundamental legal constraints that inhibit collaboration. The findings illustrate that the challenges of cross-boundary collaboration are not exclusively civil-military in nature. The Swedish administrative structure allows for multiple ways of organising civil defence, which means that the barriers encountered in cross-boundary collaboration are not limited to civil-military collaboration.