Vision zero in Sweden: Streaming through problems, politics, and policies

Abstract

In 1997, the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament, adopted Vision Zero as a new goal and strategy for road safety in Sweden (Swedish Government 1997). In the more than 20 years since the Vision Zero policy was adopted, it has spread internationally as a model of a public road safety policy (OECD/ITF 2008, 2016; World Health Organization 2017). It is not only in the transport sector that Vision Zero has attracted interest; it has also spread and continues to spread to other sectors of Swedish society such as fire safety, patient safety, occupational accidents, and suicide (Kristianssen et al. 2018). Although, road safety policies and strategies can be developed and adopted by a variety of actors at different levels in the society in a democracy, parliaments have a special position, and it establishes an exclusive legitimacy in the society. According to the Swedish Constitution (Swedish Parliament 2016), all public power proceeds from the people, and the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) is the foremost representative of the people. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the Swedish Parliament and the Swedish Government and how road safety, as a public policy, finds its way into public agenda in a competing political environment. The decision to adopt Vision Zero in Sweden was a rather radical change (Belin et al. 2011) of that time safety policy. This chapter examines the political decision-making process that preceded the decision by the Swedish Parliament to adopt the Vision Zero policy in 1997 (Swedish Parliament 1997) and the decision to re-evaluate Vision Zero in 2004 (Swedish Parliament 2004).