The influence of sustainable and smart strategies on performance measurement systems in a Swedish city

Urbanisation is a global challenge where urban areas are growing while other areas shrink their population. The challenges that arise with a globalised world affect city development practises (Vallance et al., 2012; Giffinger... [ view full abstract ]

Urbanisation is a global challenge where urban areas are growing while other areas shrink their population. The challenges that arise with a globalised world affect city development practises (Vallance et al., 2012; Giffinger et al., 2007) and have implications for management and of cities around the world (Lombardi et al, 2011; Kreuger and Gibbs, 2010). Urbanisation has lately enriched the focus on sustainability, innovation and performance (e.g. Metzger and Rader-Olsson, 2013). These changes and new challenges for public organizations have also entailed collaborative urban governance, where public organizations carry out practices together with private and non-profit organization.
Swedish cities have a strong tradition of self-government, something that could imply differences between them in relation to management and performance. In large cities there is a new strive for innovation, which is a means of both becoming more flexible to new solutions where change can be implemented faster but also something described as a necessity based on the challenges the cities now face (Bartlett and Dibben, 2002).
The aim of the paper is to increase our understanding regarding urban development and be able to support civil servants and politicians in local governments in their work with sustainable urban development. In particular, we aim to investigate how sustainable and smart strategies are implemented in a Swedish city and how they are influencing performance measurement systems.

In this paper we use the notion of governmentality of Foucault (1991) to explain the how sustainable and smart strategies are implemented as it is based on three developments (Ferlie and Ongaro, 2015): calculative technology sponsored by the government center; government fragments into a collection of indirect and hybrid organizations; and to new identity shifts and values characteristic Foucauldian analyses.
This paper consists of qualitative data from the city of Gothenburg where interviews have been carried out with key actors involved in the implementation phase of a sustainable and smart strategy. Our intention is also to, in the next steps, include data from other large Swedish cities such as Stockholm, Malmö and Helsingborg.