Making transport planning more collaborative? The case of Strategic Choice of Measures in Swedish transport planning

In 2013, a new preparatory study was established in the Swedish national transport planning process: Strategic Choice of Measures (SCM). It constitutes an arena for early dialogue between main actors and stakeholders at local, regional and national level to jointly assess transport related problems and develop solutions. This paper explores the collaborative elements of this planning method, analysing the extent to which the introduction of SCM implies fundamental steps towards a planning approach based on communicative rationality in Swedish national transport planning. The article departs from the government's recognition of the need for more and deeper collaboration between actors, new approaches and measures for transport problem, and increasing attention to demand management and modal shift to meet transport policy goals more efficiently, asking whether SCM makes national transport planning in Sweden more collaborative, in the sense of primarily relying on communicative rationality. The focus of the analysis lies on collaborative elements in the official SCM guidelines produced by the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) as an expression of an “ideal” SCM process, and a case study of an SCM process considered by the STA to be a good example of SCM in practice. The article concludes that although traces of communicative rationality are visible in both “ideal” and in practice, a more fundamental shift from instrumental to communicative rationality in Swedish national transport planning through the introduction of SCM has not occurred, since collaborative practices of SCM mainly are framed in a wider institutional framework of instrumental rationality.