Compromise and learning when negotiating sustainabilities: The brownfield development of hammarby sjöstad, stockholm

Abstract

This article examines the environmental management of Stockholm's large brownfield development Hammarby Sjöstad through the concept of negotiating sustainabilities. An Environmental Programme injected exceptional aims into an ongoing, ordinary planning process involving developers, consultants, contractors and other stakeholders. In parallel, a project team was established and given the task of realising aims through governing, networking, negotiation and persuasion. Discourse theory is used to analyse the epistemological disagreement between actors on how to operationalise the aims. Theories on governance networks and meta-governance facilitate the understanding of the project team's role in negotiations. The analysis is divided into two parts: ‘Playing the game’ focuses on the aim contents and how these were negotiated between actors, while ‘… but the game was staged’ highlights how negotiations were conditioned from the outside. The results indicate that negotiations on, for example, development contracts were circumscribed by a prehistory of institutional and interactive positioning, thus leaving only a small imprint on the actual outcome. Negotiations during events unburdened by path dependency affected outcomes more. Staging of the project team's activities was initially strong, but gradually waned. Learning within the team was rapid and gradually resulted in a higher level of aim fulfilment. After 10 years, learning is clearly discernible in other Stockholm developments too, such as the Royal Seaport. International interest, as manifested through study visits to the area, remains high. The main general lessons learned include the need for introducing exceptional aims and project organisations early in the project, and the potentially positive effects of active networking to increase actor collaboration and thus the project's field of options. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.