Page - (000319) - in Knowledge and Networks

317 vices, education, daycare, environmental protection, and planning, and municipal employees compose approximately 25 % of the Swedish workforce (Sveriges Kommuner och Landting, 2014). Although they are organized into 21 counties, the county-municipality relationship is not a hierarchical one and while Swedish municipalities operate within a framework of national law, they have considerable latitude about how to organize and deliver government services and regulation.2 Thus, their extensive and parallel responsibilities create powerful incentives to learn from one another, but their political autonomy means that they are relatively free to decide whom to learn from. We know that the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR) actively encourages the municipalities to learn from each other, but we do not know how their choice of whom to learn from aggre- gates to produce a national learning network. The chapter is organized as follows: The first section describes our data. In the second section, we provide some basic information about the extent of learning among municipalities and about how municipalities try to learn from each other. In section three, we use social network analysis to explore how municipal clusters of learning are structured. Then, in section four, we examine whether the Swedish municipalities can be described as a small world through which ideas and informa- tion may easily diffuse. Section five focuses on what characterizes the municipali- ties whose nonlocal networks bridge between otherwise disconnected municipalities in the learning network. Section six concludes. Data Our data come from a survey of Swedish municipalities conducted in 2010. The survey asked a range of questions about knowledge use in each municipality and was answered by the top civil servant. This manager is in charge of the office responsible for preparing policy proposals for the municipal executive board, which is the most important and powerful local government institution in Sweden (Bäck, 2005). Composed of local politicians appointed in proportion to their party mandate in the municipal assembly, these boards have responsibility for managing and coordinating local administration and also have financial responsibility for the municipality. The key variable of this study is learning or lesson-drawing (Freeman, 2008, p. 376; see also, Lundin, Öberg, & Josefsson, 2015). Learning is a voluntary activity involving a search for knowledge in order to solve problems. That is, in a learning process actors try to improve the understanding of the relationship between cause and effect by taking advantage of others’ experiences (Lee & Strang, 2006; 2 In a comparative perspective, Swedish local governments are considered to have a lot of power (Sellers & Lidström, 2007). Municipalities have taxing power and a constitutionally protected right of self-government. Swedish public agencies are also known to actively support innovation. The 2010 European Innobarometer Survey found that innovation in the Swedish public sector is much more bottom-up (initiated internally) rather than driven by policy mandate (Arundel & Hollanders, 2011). 15 Learning Networks Among Swedish Municipalities: Is Sweden a Small World?