State regulation of mining in a post-fordist economy: Local vulnerability in the shadow of hierarchy Simon Haikola and Jonas Anshelm

The self-archived postprint version of this journal article is available at Linköping University Institutional Repository (DiVA): http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-142030

N.B.: When citing this work, cite the original publication. Haikola, S., Anshelm, J., (2018), State regulation of mining in a post-fordist economy: Local vulnerability in the shadow of hierarchy, Political Geography, 62, 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.003

Original publication available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.003 Copyright: Elsevier (24 months) http://www.elsevier.com/

State regulation of mining in a post-Fordist economy:

Local vulnerability in the shadow of hierarchy

Simon Haikola and Jonas Anshelm, Department of Tema – Technology and social change,

Linköping University

Abstract

The paper investigates two Swedish cases of state regulation of profound infrastructural change in relation to mining above the polar circle. An analytical framework of post-fordist and neoliberal state regulation is used to investigate the extent to which neoliberal logics of depoliticisation determine the state relation to peripheral communities dominated by extractive accumulation regimes. The paper finds that the neoliberal prerogatives of distancing and flexibility are dominating the state relation to peripheral communities, and that this relation is determined by different aspects of distance. The dominance of neoliberal prerogatives also leads to a questioning of the widely held notion that the Swedish state has adopted an industrial policy devoted to mining expansion since the release of the Mineral Strategy in

2013.

Introduction

For several decades, the industrial landscape of the developed world has undergone dramatic changes. A shift from reliance on heavy industries and mass commodity production to value creation by other, less tangible, means has been framed and legitimated by neoliberal ideologies that have promoted deregulation and a withdrawal of the state from a supposedly free market. However, these processes have occurred in a

1 patchy and uneven fashion across the developed world, often breading resistance from social groups and geographic areas left behind when the forms and centres of capital accumulation shifted. States have responded differently to crises in accordance with the specific premises of each region’s unique history, culture and socio-economic configuration. This paper uses the literature on depoliticisation as a form of state regulation (e.g. Burnham, 2002; Flinders & Buller, 2006; Hay, 2007; Jessop, 2014) to understand the regulatory approach taken by the Swedish state towards mining development in two municipalities above the polar circle, both of which have undergone radical infrastructural and industrial transformations in the last decade. In both cases, the transformation should be seen in the context of a global mineral markets boom and bust cycle that ended around 2011.

There is an ample literature on different aspects of neoliberal regulation of peripheral communities, describing how municipal governments are left vulnerable when the state retreats from responsibilities that are delegated to the local administration and private business (Barnett, 2003, 2011; Haslam McKenzie et al, 2009; Skelcher, 2000; Sørensen & Torfing, 2009; see Cheshire et al, 2014; Cheshire, 2010 for the specific cases of mining). This devolvement of central responsibility in the previous decades has been described in terms of “a hollowing out of the state” (Rhodes, 1997), or the creation of an “institutional void” (Hajer, 2003; see further Kooiman, 2003; Rhodes, 2000; Stoker, 2000, 2004).

However, such studies rarely relate their object of study to a comprehensive theoretical framework on the dynamics of neoliberal regulation. At the same time, the literature on depoliticisation, which provides just such a theoretical framework, suffers from a lack of empirical studies of how neoliberal regulation plays out in concrete cases, and especially what happens along different geographical and institutional scales when the state is depoliticised (Hay, 2014). In this paper, we will therefore use the theoretical tools from the depoliticisation literature, together with Bob Jessop’s and David Harvey’s ideas on state regulation of capitalism, to analyse our two cases as instances of a dynamic interplay between state action/inaction and local governmental attempts to repoliticise areas from which they see the state retreating.

A neoliberal shift in Swedish mining, on-going from the 1990s, has been accompanied by depoliticisation in two important senses:

2 a) The construction of a discursive, parliamentary consensus on the benefits of expanding the mining sector for Sweden as whole (see Wood & Flinders, 2014). b) Deregulation and deferral of responsibility for the oversight and expansion of the sector from the governmental sphere to private, semi-private, sub-state and local governmental actors (see Hay, 2007).

From this premise, we formulate a threefold purpose: 1) To show the extent to which depoliticisation determines the relation of a state historically committed to sustained industrial policy and welfare provision for industrial centres across the country (e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990; Katzenstein, 1985) – what Jessop terms the “social fix” of capital accumulation (2001, p.13) – to peripheral pockets of Fordist accumulation regimes, and how neoliberal regulation is in itself determined by different forms of distance; 2) To stake the theoretical claim that repoliticisation should be understood as a response across geographical and institutional scales to which capacities and especially liabilities have been deferred by a neoliberal state whose power remains intact, and that repoliticisation occurs in a continuous boundary negotiation between the state and those actors and agencies to which capacities and liabilities have been deferred (see also Hay, 2007; Jessop, 2014; Kuzemko, 2014); 3) To question the notion promoted both by governmental representatives through the period covered and their critics, that the Swedish state has led an expansive mining policy since at least 2013, when the conservative government adopted its new Mineral Strategy (Swedish Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, 2013).

The two cases chosen for this study allow for fruitful interrogation of neoliberal regulatory logics for two main reasons. Firstly, there is a number of factors involved that would make a strong state involvement in these mining developments seem likely: the history of the Swedish welfare state with socially deep and geographically wide extensions, the external pressure from the EU, which identified Sweden, the largest mining nation in Europe, as vital to resource security regarding certain raw materials such as iron in its raw materials initiative of 2008 (SEC, 2008), as well as the facts that one of the communities, Kiruna, is home to one of the biggest companies owned by the Swedish state, while the other one, Pajala, became a flagship for the governmental Mineral Strategy of 2013. Secondly, and related to the last point, the difference between the two communities allow for comparison of the state regulatory approach towards

3 two very different types of mining community. Kiruna is a historical centre of Swedish mining where state owned LKAB has played a key role in Swedish state-led industrial development in the 20th century. Pajala is a municipality that has been severely affected by industrial reorientation since the 1980s and was only transformed into a mining community in 2012, as a part of a neoliberal shift in the Swedish mining sector.

State regulation of capitalism

Underpinning our analysis is an understanding of capitalism as inherently volatile and in need of state regulation. Capital accumulations and the associated devaluations materialise in different ways across geographical and temporal scales, which means that uneven geographical development becomes a key feature of the capitalistic landscape, both as a figure of speech and quite literally.

Being inherently volatile, capitalism may acquire a degree of stability through the establishment of accumulation regimes, a “pattern of production and consumption that is reproducible over a long period” (Jessop 2001, p.4). The concept of an accumulation regime is macro-economic and describes the broad developmental goals that states pursue as they strive for economic growth, as well as the economic logics and prerogatives leading to the development of institutional structures and regulatory mechanisms. Such structures and regulation technologies, in turn, form a more or less coherent mode of regulation that may “stabilise an accumulation regime” (ibid). A mode of regulation acts through concrete technologies such as legal frameworks and the banking and credit system, but also through “softer” forms such as the steering of social conduct and norms, thus serving to lend the accumulation regime an aura of legitimacy, inevitability, and permanence (Jessop, 2001; see also Li, 2007; Mann, 2009).

However, the relative permanence of accumulation regimes does not mean they are immune to the volatility shocks inherent to capitalism. Waves of devaluation spread unevenly within accumulation regimes, just as the regimes themselves are subject to pressures from within and without that may eventually lead to their being impossible to sustain. As devaluations occur, they give rise to crises of different forms and magnitude

4 along spatial and temporal scales. The role of the capitalistic state has largely been to regulate such crises and delimit them in time and place, allowing for the continued reproduction of capital accumulation on a national scale. The key mechanism employed by states in this pursuit has been the spatial and temporal “fix” (Harvey, 2006), which allows states to switch crises across geographical regions and defer them into the future, thus temporarily avoiding a full-blown crisis for capitalism without ever resolving its inherent contradictions. Even in good times, however, the structural contradictions within capitalism continue to generate conflict and social tensions, meaning that states must always deploy what Jessop calls a “social fix” that “partially compensates for the incompleteness of the pure capital relation and gives it a specific dynamic through the articulation of its economic and extra-economic elements, [securing] a relatively durable pattern of structural coherence in the handling of the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the capital relation” (Jessop 2001, p.13). Even these social fixes work only “partially and provisionally at best, through the formulation-realisation of specific accumulation strategies in specific spatio-temporal contexts” (ibid), and they are therefore in themselves conflict-generating and potential sources of crises (ibid).

Many scholars on political geography have argued that the decades since Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s have seen a structural crisis of the Fordist accumulation regime, which was characterised by growth generated mainly through heavy industry and mass production of commodities, and a state actively involved in the social fix that assures continued value production through different forms of welfare programs (Jessop, 2012; Tickell & Peck, 1995). These new strategies have taken many forms, such as the “knowledge economy”, but arguably the most important and, perhaps, least officially articulated tendency has been the rise of a new accumulation regime based on financial speculation, or what Marx referred to as “fictitious capital” (Marx, 1991), facilitated by the promotion of neoliberal ideology and the implementation of deregulatory measures (Harvey, 2005, 2007; Jessop, 2012). A characteristic of this new accumulation regime has been an unprecedented accumulation of capital surpluses in certain geographical centres and among individuals, and, on the other side of the equation, the proliferation of financial crises and devaluations. The breaking down of barriers – legal, temporal and spatial – to the free movement of capital has radically reinforced the crisis tendency inherent in capitalism. However, it has also assured the survival of the new accumulation regime, at least up to now, as it as has proved possible for devaluations to

5 be limited locally and asymmetrically through the mechanism of uneven geographical development. The heaviest cost of devaluation has often been localised in areas lacking the power to influence political and economic decisions (Harvey, 2005, 2006).

Depoliticisation as state regulation

For several scholars on neoliberal forms of government, the shift into post-Fordist accumulation regimes has been facilitated by and effected through the adoption of neoliberal modes of regulation that amounts to depoliticisation (Flinders & Wood, 2014; Hay, 2007, 2014; Jessop, 2014; Kerr et al, 2011; Oksala, 2011; Tosa, 2009; see Foster et al, 2014 for a thorough discussion about relations between theories on neoliberal governance and depoliticisation). While the precise meaning of the term differs somewhat between writers, the two key, mutually reinforcing aspects that are important for us in the present paper are that depoliticisation entails: 1) Delegation of formal decision-making powers and responsibility from the official, central governmental sphere to subordinate levels of semi-independent governments, the private and semi-private sector, and different instances of expert, technocratic management; 2) The construction and maintenance of discursive consensus concerning certain taken-for-granted ideas about the good society, the most important of which is the supposedly free market economy.

Both aspects are premised on and contribute to construct the appearance of a free market paradigm, whereby governmental intervention in the affairs of nominally independent market actors is perceived as wrong. This, however, is not to be taken as a removal of politics altogether, but rather as, in Burnham’s words, the “process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making” (2002, p.136). Thus, a supposed consensus around how government and market should relate to each other shifts politics from the official sphere, making socio-economic and technological development appear as the result of neutral, technocratic decision-making and natural market forces, rather than political deliberation. However, as the state delegates responsibilities to other spheres it retains certain unique powers. The dynamic that results from this displacement of politics is often unpredictable and socially disruptive,

6 leading to different forms of repoliticisation that could be said to be typical of neoliberal state regulation (Jessop, 2014).

Herein lies the main problem with depoliticisation (disregarding moral arguments pertaining to the value of transparency and democracy), namely the discrepancy between formal capacities and actual liabilities. The notion of “benign” depoliticisation, i.e. that the state should depoliticise itself for the benefit of society, is premised on the idea of a perfect, disembedded capitalistic market that forms the core of neoliberal ideology. In relation to local government, this creates the problem that increased liabilities are not followed by a corresponding increase in capacities. The powers to intervene to smooth out the consequences of localised crises, powers that remain largely reserved for the national state, are disavowed as being illegal, unjust, impossible or economically unsound to wield. At the same time, the highly unequal power relations that exist between municipalities, as well as between the municipalities and the state, become misrepresented as a natural result of apolitical market forces.

In this understanding, then, the key to understanding neoliberal, depoliticised regulatory regimes and the specific kinds of social and environmental problems they cause, is to treat political processes as equally important under neoliberalism as under other historical modes of regulation. This means that the central problem with neoliberal depoliticisation is neither that politics are hidden away from the public, nor that certain specific issues become removed from public deliberation. Both aspects might well be important and problematic in specific instances, but it would be hard to argue that either is unique to neoliberalism (see also Foster et al, 2014). We may therefore assume both aspects to be subordinate to, and often a result of, the central neoliberal problem of a state actively curtailing its own capacities without delegating a corresponding amount of capacity.

Our theoretical assumption in the present paper is therefore that the powers of the neoliberal state are fundamentally unchanged, but that it chooses to delegate capacities and liabilities elsewhere, for economical, ideological or other reasons1, often resulting in

1 Three things deserve brief mention here: 1) The difference between economic and ideological reasons is arbitrary and could indeed be seen as a neoliberal (or liberal) construction in itself; 2) Ideology may certainly become reified through institutions and thereby act as a practical constraint on state power; 3) The extent to which supra-state institutions have worked to limit the capacities of the national state should not be underestimated, but it must remain a factor peripheral to our current investigation.

7 social tensions and attempts at repoliticisation. It follows that de- and repoliticisation must always be understood as context dependent phenomena, where the latter only makes analytical sense in relation to the former (and the former only in relation to a preceding politicisation).

Notes on method and terminology

Our analysis of the Kiruna and Pajala cases is based on press material from 2006 to 2016, with a focus on official statements by involved actors and signed opinion pieces by involved actors or the local press. The historical nature of the press material means we did not have to rely only on statements made with hindsight. We also use interviews with municipal politicians - conducted in Pajala (5) in the spring of 2015 and in Kiruna (6) in summer 2016 – and with figures from outside of the local political administrations of respective communities (one interview with the governor of the Norrbotten country administrative board, and one interview with the project leader for the city transformation in Kiruna), as well as protocols from parliamentary debates, to supplement the press material.

The press material was collected using the Retriever search engine, with which we searched all major Swedish newspapers, the business press and other relevant papers for mention of the two cases. Having sifted through the raw data, we ended up with around 230 relevant articles that have formed the basis of our analysis, together with the interviews. It should be mentioned that we did not perform any media analysis, but used the press material as a point of access to the statements and actions of relevant actors at the time. The relevant texts were closely read in an initial reading, in which their central meanings were identified and used as basis for categorization. In a second reading, we then focused on those texts that dealt with the issues of state responsibility, state approach to the infrastructural changes in Kiruna and Pajala, as well as the response of the local administrations and the local communities to this approach. The themes that surfaced here as key issues for the concerned actors were: principles for

8 state ownership, the government’s attitude towards assuming economical responsibility and the concurrent demands for it to do so, the right of local inhabitants to economical compensation, the governmental interest or lack of interest in the development of heavy industry, the role of the mining industry in creating employment and social stability in the north of Sweden, the vulnerability of northern, sparsely populated municipalities, deregulation and privatisation of mining companies versus nationalisation, tensions between national and local level politics, and, finally, relations of power between northern, sparsely populated municipalities producing/extracting natural resources and the capital. When analysing these themes, we were particularly attentive to points of contention and controversy, in order to identify valuation patterns in relation to concerned actors. We were thus able to discern actors’ attitudes towards the key problems concerning the conditions of the mining industry, the developmental possibilities for peripheral communities and the state’s function in a society that is oriented towards neoliberalism on a national level, but whose local and regional levels are still much reliant on post-Fordist value accumulation for the maintenance of their social and economic structures.

We used semi-structured interviews to get a perspective from inside the local administrations in the two communities. The interview questions were developed on the basis of the themes identified through the text analysis, but the dialogues also revealed important nuances and tensions that were not visible in the written texts. They also served the purpose of clarifying and deepening our understanding of issues raised by the text readings. Thus, the interviews had a complementary function, while they also served to strengthen the observations we made in the text analysis. The texts and interviews function together to identify the regulatory approach taken by the state to the infrastructural changes in each community, and how the state approach has been experienced by the local political administrations.

Our theoretical framework dictates our rather sharp, terminological dividing line between national state, on the one hand, and local and regional governments on the other. The rationale for this lies in the idea of depoliticisation as a form of state regulation, and our thus derived theoretical assumption that such a dividing line is central to neoliberal forms of depoliticisation, in the sense that the state attempts to delegate responsibility from itself to actors across this line. This limited notion of the

9 state should not be construed as corresponding to a limited view of state power. As regards the concepts of Fordism and neoliberalism, we take the former to relate solely to the production base of the economy, i.e. by which types of production value is created2, while the latter is associated with ideas about how the state should approach and regulate the national economy, as well as how other actors within society should operate in relation to each other and to the state on a common, supposedly free market.

Analysis

Situating the study – Kiruna and Pajala: A tale of two neighbours and uneven geographical development

Throughout the twentieth century, the northern parts of Sweden supplied the state with the raw materials that laid the foundation for the nation’s development into a welfare society. However, as the Swedish economy became more geared towards the creation of value through other means than extraction and commodity production, and developed into what is often referred to as a post-Fordist economy (e.g. Jessop, 2001), questions arose over what social responsibility the state should assume for locales of production still dependent on old-school value production. At the same time, the importance of the Swedish mining industry was underlined by the EU raw materials initiative of 2008, which stressed the importance of self-sufficiency in regard to crucial raw materials (SEC, 2008). Around 91% of European iron ore production is located in the north of Sweden, which is also the major supplier of several basic minerals (Geological Survey of Sweden,

2 In this paper, we describe mining as a Fordist form of accumulation. The mining industry today is certainly different from what it was a couple of decades ago, as it has undergone organisational and technological changes that are of a rather more post-Fordist character, integrating it into the “knowledge economy”. However, in terms of how value is generated, it remains largely unchanged, as it still relies fundamentally on the extraction of raw material to be sold on a market determined by supply and demand (the extent to which the so called “financialisation” of mining has affected this basic equation remains a subject for debate, see, for example 14; Irwin & Sanders, 2011; Miffre & Brooks, 2013; Stoll & Whaley, 2010; Tang & Xiong, 2012). Adams & Glück, 2015; Büyükşahin & Robe, 20

10 2015). In response to calls from the EU Commission as well as pressure from the opposition Social Democratic and Left parties, calling for increased state attention to the importance of mining both for peripheral communities and for the national economy, the Swedish liberal-conservative government adopted a policy aimed at supporting and expanding the national mining industry, mainly through neoliberal mechanisms of deregulation and removal of barriers (Envall, 2015). The Mineral Strategy of 2013 (Swedish Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, 2013) that was developed by the conservative-liberal government and received broad parliamentary support, was both a continuation of a neoliberal movement in the state’s approach to mining that had been on-going since the 1990s, and a signal of a newly awoken state interest in the Swedish mining sector (Envall, 2015; Haikola and Anshelm, 2016; Liedholm Johnson, 2000, 2010). Based on an implicit understanding of the mining sector as inherently beneficial for Sweden as a whole, the Strategy disavowed the potential for fundamental value conflicts triggered by mining expansion, as well as by the role of the state in this expansion (Envall, 2015; Anshelm & Haikola, forthcoming). Thus, there have been countervailing tendencies as regards the relation of the Swedish state to communities dependent on the extraction and processing of minerals, and these communities’ position within the overall industrial policy of the state.

The events covered in this paper should also be understood within the context of the dramatic movements on the world iron ore market in the 21st century. Having suffered a dip when the financial crisis of 2008 hit, iron prices quickly bounced back, largely due to the fact that commodity producers had not yet made up the gap between supply and the demand emanating from BRIC countries (Christian, 2009; Pettis, 2012). In Sweden, exploration costs remained high and financial analysts remained bullish about the metal market up until 2012 (Geological Survey of Sweden, 2015; Haikola & Anshelm, 2017). However, the inevitable rebalancing of the Chinese economy towards decreased reliance on the import of hard commodities, coupled with supply overtaking demand, meant that the boom must eventually turn into bust (Pettis, 2012, 2013). By 2011–2012, global iron prices had started falling, and in 2014, the spot price for iron ore was halved. The sharp downturn continued in 2015, with the first six months of 2015 seeing a 65 % price drop since the end of 2013 (Geological Survey of Sweden, 2015).

11 Kiruna and Pajala are two municipalities located in Norrbotten, a sparsely populated region in northern Sweden in which many small communities have been severely hit by changes in the country’s industrial base and move to a post-Fordist society. Both municipalities are historically firmly anchored in the political left and have a long tradition of Social-Democratic rule. In the last ten years, 10,000 jobs within the state sector have disappeared from the countryside in Sweden, a loss that hits sparsely populated municipalities in peripheral regions such as Norrbotten especially hard (Gänger, 2015). However, this development has both its winners and losers, for the regional economic centre of Luleå has seen continuous in-migration since the 1960s. The mining town of Kiruna, the home of the state-owned company LKAB, has been relatively stable over the same period, even though it suffered a significant population drop in the 1970s. However, the municipality of Pajala has been steadily declining, losing half its population of 12,000 in 1969. A significant number of those leaving migrated to Kiruna to work in the mines (Statistics Sweden, 2017). Thus, Kiruna and Pajala are part of a complex relationship of uneven geographical development, in which the latter stands in a peripheral relation to the former, while both share a peripheral status in relation to the regional centre of Luleå and the national centre of Stockholm.

In 2008 Northland Resources, formerly a Canadian exploration company that had acquired the rights to the Pajala iron deposits in 2005, created plans to establish a mining centre with three production lines in Pajala. The plans raised the prospect of a demographic and economic turnaround, and the possibility of finally being able to attract workers instead of seeing them disappear to Kiruna or urban centres. According to the company’s plans, Pajala would become Europe’s second-largest producer of iron. The venture also meant a break with the informal monopoly, in place since the middle of the previous century, of the state over iron production (Bergman, 2012; Liedholm Johnson & Ericson, 2015; Mining Inspectorate of Sweden, 2016; U.S. Geological Survey, 2016). However, even though the project went ahead at record speed and the first production line was opened in the fall of 2012, it eventually foundered upon the rocks of market volatility, and Northland Resources declared bankruptcy late in 2014. The rapid change of fortunes in Pajala have received vast press coverage as it has been described as largest private bankruptcy in the country’s history, leaving behind vast unaccounted for environmental problems and social costs.

12 Kiruna, located 180 kilometres northwest of Pajala, is home to four of the mines of the state-owned mining company LKAB and is the largest centre of iron production in Europe. Since the state assumed ownership of LKAB in 1957, it has acted as an important buffer in times of crises. A severe crisis that followed the opening of global markets in the 1970s led to LKAB facing the possibility of a complete shut-down. Instead, heavy rationalisations coupled with the value added by the ability to sell pelletised iron, enabled the company to weather the storm and eventually return to profitability. This event, widely regarded as the time LKAB had come closest to bankruptcy, reveals two telling aspects of the Swedish state as a mining company owner. First, it can serve as a potentially crucial shield against the vicissitudes of the world market. Secondly, that it would do so only on the premise of economically rational restructuring, risking the wrath of the people laid off in the process (Hansson, 2015; Liedholm Johnson & Ericsson, 2015).

Kiruna

In 2005, the municipal administration in Kiruna was informed by LKAB that continued mining operations would require opening a new main level for extraction 1365 metres below ground. Since then, discussions about state influence over mining operations in Kiruna between government, parliament, LKAB, municipal, and local interest groups have been totally dominated by the issue of how the city transformation necessitated by the expansion, which entails moving large parts of the city of Kiruna, should proceed. The main themes in these discussions were ownership of LKAB and the financing of the city transformation.

As Sweden began preparing for parliamentary elections in 2006, representatives of the four right-wing opposition parties, united under the banner of the Alliance, announced, in the spring of 2005, their intention to privatise a number of state-owned companies, including LKAB, in the event of a change in government (“Alliansen laddar…”, 2005). However, on this issue opinion polls indicated popular support for the incumbent government, which severely criticised the idea of privatising infrastructure and natural resources of national and regional importance. Accordingly, the liberal-conservative Alliance backed off their original plan. Having won the elections, the new liberal- conservative government insisted that LKAB should remain under government

13 ownership. The newly appointed Minister of Enterprise, Maud Olofsson, made it clear that the municipality of Kiruna had a right to expect a direct and responsible involvement by the state, and that the complex city transformation justified state ownership (Hallgren, 2006; Örn, 2007).

The question of state ownership was raised again before the next parliamentary election in 2010. Opposition Social Democratic politicians on both local and national levels, together with union representatives, claimed that the incumbent government was planning to privatise LKAB if re-elected. This claim seemed to be substantiated by the official declaration by the then-chairman of the company, Björn Sprängare, that privatisation would make the complex city transformation much easier as it would clarify relationships of responsibility and allow for more economically rational steering of the company (“LKAB skulle….”, 2010; Nordlund, 2010; Persson, 2010). Arguing against the supposed government privatisation plan, influential Social Democratic economic spokesmen claimed that such a change of ownership was both economically irrational and lacked popular support (“Östros…”, 2010). In response to attempts by the local mining union and local Social Democratic politicians to make the issue central to the upcoming election, PM Fredrik Reinfeldt and other key members of the liberal- conservative government issued statements reiterating their commitment to keeping LKAB in state hands (Björklund & Schück, 2010; Pettersson, 2010).

During the 2010 elections, the liberal-conservative government dismissed the Social Democratic argument that nationally crucial resources should be kept under state ownership. It insisted that state ownership of LKAB was only defensible because of the unique situation in Kiruna, which necessitated state involvement. As the liberal- conservative Alliance kept to this line after winning the elections, the idea of privatising LKAB became politically non-existent. By carefully balancing ideological fealty and realpolitik, the Alliance managed to keep social unrest at bay in Norrbotten, which was heavily in favour of a state-owned LKAB, while proclaiming a general commitment to privatising state companies. The huge profits generated by LKAB in this period and their importance to a government striving to keep a budget surplus in a time of global economic downturn cannot be discounted as a crucial factor in the considerations. In the context of this balancing act between ideology and pragmatism, the appointment of Marcus Wallenberg, one of the foremost national symbols of the power of private

14 capital, as Björn Sprängare’s successor as chairman of the board of LKAB should be interpreted as a measure both pragmatically and symbolically important in fusing the ideas of continued state ownership and neoliberal doctrine (Björklund & Schück , 2010; Gripenberg, 2011; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Pettersson, 2011).

The argument that state supervision and oversight is needed for sustainable city transformation rings hollow in the light of the actual practice of successive governments, which has consistently been one of distancing. The lack of a legal framework to deal adequately with the complex issues of financing involved in an infrastructure challenge of this magnitude has been pointed out by different actors ever since 2007, when the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning identified a significant gap between the funding LKAB could legally be expected to provide and what was actually needed. Local politicians across the political spectrum, members of parliament with a regional connection, the local press, and the mining union have since echoed these sentiments, arguing it would only be fair for a state that was extracting record profits from the Kiruna mines to reserve part of that capital to secure the sustainable transformation of the city (Abrahamsson, 2009; Lindberg, 2009; Persson, 2010; Poromaa, 2009abc; “Östros…”, 2010). Most distressing for the municipal administration was the uncertainty over how people being forced to move into new apartments would be compensated, as well as how new municipal buildings, the new E10 road, and the new railway station would be financed (Abrahamsson, 2015; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Karlsson, 2013a).

These claims and arguments have fallen on deaf ears. Successive governments have stressed, very much in contrast to the argument about the need for continued state ownership, that negotiations regarding financing must be conceived as a two-party process between a municipality and a business entity regulated by the Mineral Law (Bergmark, 2009; Nyström, 2008). Few differences are noticeable between the approach of the liberal-conservative governments in power between 2006 and 2014 and the current Social-Democratic-Green government. This fact was not lost on the head of the local mining union who observed that the new, supposedly left-leaning government had not “done a goddamn thing” to help out the community (Carr, 2016; Johansson, 2016; Wrede, 2016). The unwillingness of the state to commit funds to the city move has created much local resentment. Municipal politicians of all party affiliations, the local

15 mining union, individual debaters with some connection to Kiruna, housing companies, and local interest groups, have united in expressing a feeling of being abandoned by Stockholm, regardless of who was in government (Andersson, 2014; Blomgren, 2013; Carr, 2016; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Karlsson, 2013ab; Unga, 2012). The local resentment has been further aggravated by the fact that the state apparently maintains a form of involvement from a distance, as evidenced by the fact that the state Transport Administration suddenly took it upon itself to determine the route of the new E10 highway in a ruling that did not satisfy any party, while also leaving the issue of financing unresolved. According to municipal politicians, this decision cannot have come from anywhere but the government (Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016). Another important manifestation of such continued involvement came when Minister of Enterprise Maud Olofsson met with city councillor Kristina Zakrisson and impressed upon her the government’s intention to overrule the municipality’s veto over land-use issues, in the case of a standstill in negotiations with the company. As the planning monopoly was the main bargaining chip of the municipality in these negotiations, its real power in this supposedly equal two-party relation may be questioned (Interview June 2, 2016).

Within the local administration, there has been some criticism of the leadership for being excessively lenient towards LKAB (Holma, 2011; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Lindner, 2010; Sternlund, 2011). The most common perception of the negotiations at this level of government, however, has recognised the mutual dependence of the company and the municipality, and even shown sympathy towards LKAB for having been forced into a position of responsibility for issues in which it clearly lacks experience (Holma, 2011; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Sternlund, 2011). Instead, the government has been blamed for its continued failure to give clear instructions to the company about how to compensate the city and its inhabitants, and for what has been perceived as a total lack of interest in the local goings-on, symbolised by a lack of physical presence (Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016). The distance of the state to the goings-on in Kiruna has been further increased by the lack of informal channels of communication between the liberal-conservative government in power between 2006 and 2014 and the Social-Democratic dominated municipal administration (Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016).

16 Even so, despite the feeling of being abandoned by the national government to inadequate legislation and a difficult negotiation position vis-à-vis a state-owned company, there is a widespread feeling in the municipal administration that they were fortunate to have been able to negotiate important aspects of the city transformation with LKAB during a mineral boom. Many believe the compensation package for new municipal buildings agreed on in 2013, amounting to SEK3.74 billion, was a success for the municipal administration and would have been extremely difficult to achieve a year later, as global iron prices plummeted (Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016). Today, with LKAB struggling with falling profits, there is a deep sense of concern in the city about how negotiations surrounding unresolved issues will proceed (Carr, 2016; Interviews May 31 & June 2, 2016; Johansson, 2016; Wrede, 2016).

Pajala

With the announcement in 2008 of a positive economic feasibility study for its Greenfield mining project in Pajala, Northland Resources injected hope of economic and demographic rejuvenation in a municipality that had been struggling with falling tax revenue and a declining population for decades. Once it became clear that the company was serious about its plans, however, the municipality was faced with the difficult task of planning for a multi-billion, large-scale infrastructure project with a municipal budget and administration adapted to a community of around 6000, projected to increase by 50 % in just a few years (Ejdemo & Söderholm, 2008).

The challenges were immense for the short-staffed administration. There were repeated calls from municipal politicians for involvement from the national government, and complaints that Stockholm did not realise, or care to realise, the risks faced by the small municipality and the lack of sufficient staff to properly analyse all relevant aspects of such a huge project (Interviews May 22, 2015). Especially important, said city councillor Bengt Niska, would be government investments in housing, roads, schools, and social services, as Pajala would need to become an attractive place to live if the community was to avoid the establishment of a fly-in-fly-out economy (Nilsson, 2009; Wiman, 2011; Wrede, 2010). The mining project was intensely promoted by city councillor Niska and

17 his successor Kurt Wennberg, who persistently lobbied the government to invest. They were supported by the County Administrative Board of Norrbotten, where the county governor P.O. Eriksson and his successor, Sven-Erik Österberg, both took a direct and active interest in the project’s development (Forsberg, 2015; Herin, 2011; Interviews May 22 & 25, 2015; Jacobsson, 2012; Tjällman, 2012). At the same time, individual members of parliament with a local or regional connection urged the government to commit financially, focusing on investments in transport infrastructure and in housing (Parliamentary debates 2007/08:32, 2010/11:39, 2012/13:87, 2009/10:91, 2011/12:79, 2011/12:93; Questions for written answer 2008/09:84, 2009/10:471; Interpellation 2011/12:312).

The sense of neglect and lack of interest from Stockholm regarding the concrete difficulties encountered in the planning and evaluation of the project would persist throughout the planning process, with the municipality instead becoming reliant upon the County Administrative Board for resources and assistance (Interview May 22, 2015). However, the government did commit financially to the project through the crucial investment of 2 billion SEK for the construction of a new road for ore transport, as well as through financial support for the hiring of staff from the Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (Anderberg, 2013; Interview May 22, 2015; Nordenskiöld, 2010). There were good reasons to expect the liberal-conservative government in power between 2006 and 2014 to take an interest in the Pajala project, since it seemed to fit perfectly with the government’s view of the mining industry as a suitable motor for regional development. Indeed, while the project proceeded on track, it was often highlighted by the government as a prime example of its policy on resource extraction, as formulated in the Mineral Strategy of 2013 (Herin, 2011; Parliamentary debate 2009/10:9; Wrede, 2010). State support was manifested through several high-ranking visits to Pajala, a community that had not received such attention for decades. (Anderberg, 2013; Widmark, 2012).

In this context, it is also important to note the unusual speed with which the first mine (of a total of three planned) was moved through the permitting process. In a unique manoeuver, a little known agency called the Finnish–Swedish Transboundary River Commission, with no expertise and no previous experience of mining issues, took over the decision on the environmental permit from the ordinary regulatory agency, the

18 County Administrative Board. It moved quickly to approve the start-up of the first mine. Such an unusual measure must have been approved, either explicitly or tacitly, by the national government. When the County Administrative Board, deprived of its usual mandate, instead attempted to insert its main environmental concerns into the municipal zoning plan, it was overruled by then–Minister of Housing, Stefan Attefall (Sundkvist & Fagerlind, 2015). In October of 2012, the Tapuli mine was put in production.

Taken together, events and developments such as these point not so much to a coherent state policy aimed at facilitating mining but rather to the existence of a window of opportunity. Uniquely high world market prices and the reorientation of Swedish mineral policy toward stimulating an increase in private capital investment in peripheral regions allowed individual initiatives emanating from a local or regional level to reach and influence state activities. While the government may or may not have wholeheartedly supported the idea of a new mine in Pajala, there was regulatory space open to those keenly interested in pushing it through, as it seemed to fit perfectly within the liberal-conservative government’s profile as both a supporter of regional development and a champion of private enterprise. As iron prices reached record levels in 2011, voices warning of an imminent drop in the price of raw materials were few and went largely unheeded (Bergman, 2012; Pettis, 2012, 2013).

When it came, however, the drop quickly undermined investors’ belief in the project that had seen the mine move from feasibility study to production in record time. Soon after the opening of the Tapuli mine, Northland revealed a serious lack of financing and underwent a first restructuring, in which it was kept afloat by a number of big investors. At end of 2013, however, as market prices kept tumbling, the company was forced to seek a second restructuring, and this time, investor patience had run out. In the fall of 2014, Northland Resources filed for bankruptcy (Haikola & Anshelm, 2017).

The time since the company filed for a second restructuring has in many ways been similar to the years leading up to the start of production, in that the municipality of Pajala, mainly through its city councillor together with the county governor of Norrbotten, has been lobbying intensely for both private and state investments. With venture capital’s thirst for iron ore rapidly drying up along with falling prices, these efforts were focused on gaining government support for a state-led takeover of the mine

19 through the involvement of LKAB (Interviews May 22, 2015; Jönsson, 2014ab; Nordlund, 2014).

At the same time, other informal channels were used through a group of big financiers led by Anders Sundström, a former Social Democratic minister with close ties to the Social Democratic establishment. Having led a rescue effort that was thwarted through the recalcitrance of foreign investors in 2014, Sundström expressed his disbelief and disappointment at what he perceived as government abdication of responsibility for Pajala in an editorial addressed directly to the Minister for Enterprise and Innovation, Mikael Damberg (Sundström, 2015).

Through it all, the response to the crisis for the Pajala mine since the revelation of serious financial troubles by Northland Resources in 2013 has never been anything more substantial than declarations of concern from the liberal-conservative government and its successor Social Democratic-Green Party government. As prices kept plummeting, the government refrained from committing to any kind of rescue action involving either direct state investment, which would have allowed the mine to be put into hibernation while waiting for a bounce-back in iron prices, or a take-over by LKAB. Some, like Anders Sundström, have argued that the government should use its ownership mandate of LKAB to force the company into involvement, while the government has argued that any such decision must come from the company itself. When pressured by city councillor Rantakyrö on the state’s inactivity on the issue, Minister for Enterprise and Innovation Mikael Damberg claimed the government had done all it could in demanding that LKAB consider all possibilities, and that the company had failed in this. For the inhabitants of Pajala, it did not matter much who was ultimately responsible as they watched the chances of the mine restarting diminish by the day (Engström, 2016; Johansson, 2015; Sundqvist & Carr, 2016).

Concluding discussion

20

State capacities and liabilities in neoliberal state regulation

The image of the state that emerges from the preceding analysis is markedly different from the one that was described in the 1980s by Esping-Andersen (1990) and Katzenstein, (1985), whose primary role was to decommodify the welfare and keep the market at bay. Its main prerogative in both cases analysed in the present paper seems to have been to limit its liabilities by keeping at a distance, this despite significant impulses for sustained state involvement in the social fixes of Kiruna and Pajala: the Swedish history of a strong state devoted to industrial and welfare policy, the EU raw materials initiative, voter happiness in the affected regions, and ongoing pressure from these regions for state action. Thus, the “social fix” described by Jessop as the investments in the social basis of production necessary for continued capital accumulation has been left in the hands of the company in Kiruna and the hands of the municipality in Pajala. In Kiruna, the responsibility of LKAB has been clearly defined by the government as a purely juridical matter regulated by the Mineral Law, in a way that logically nullifies the argument for state ownership which has, nevertheless, been maintained by successive governments. In Pajala a limited state investment proved to be the limit of direct state involvement.

The analysis suggests that the state’s distance, in different aspects, from the mining operations in the north is of crucial relevance here. Most importantly, on the level of industrial policy, the state has revealed a distinct lack of interest in the social fixing of the forms of accumulation regimes represented by Pajala and Kiruna. In both cases, rhetorical lip service to the importance of state support has been contradicted by actual practice. Northland Resources’ project in Pajala was treated as an opportunity for regional development, rather than as an important initiative for the national economy as a whole. In the case of Kiruna, the state has clearly defined the relation involved in the city transformation as being between only two parties: the company and the municipality. The distance created between the state and local affairs through such a configuration of responsibility amounts to a distancing also from a certain mode of regulation in which large-scale, heavy industrial projects constituted the motor force of the economy, which necessitated a coherent industrial policy, involving the state in the

21 local economy, of a kind that has been regarded with suspicion for several decades (Parker, 1999).

The metaphorical distance between a state oriented towards post-Fordist production and peripheral pockets of older, Fordist accumulation regimes such as Pajala and Kiruna, is related to the physical, geographical distance between centre and periphery. The further removed, quite literally, from the eyes of the state the actual infrastructure changes on the ground are, the easier it becomes for the state to distance itself and cut its ties of responsibility.

This distancing should also be understood in relation to the argument that capitalism in itself has a tendency to globalise, equalise, and make abstract, i.e. to remove from view the particularities of the localities where production and crises are generated and to acknowledge as relevant only abstract exchange value (Harvey, 1996; Lefebvre, 1991; Marx, 1990). Neoliberal depoliticisation could then be understood as a way of legitimising this fundamental capitalistic logic, or of facilitating its manifestation in politics. The physical, geographical, as well as the metaphorical distance on the level of industrial policy, then become factors that determine the ease with which this logic may impose itself. The same goes, furthermore, for social distance, a factor that has also played a part in these cases, or at least in Kiruna, where the mismatch between a Social- Democratic municipal government and a liberal-conservative national government made informal contact between the two levels of government difficult (Interview May 31, 2016).

Relating this discussion to Harvey’s notion of ‘circumscribed neoliberalism’ (2005), a term he uses to explain the way specific national configurations of governance determine the manifestation in concrete cases of neoliberal regulatory logics, we can stipulate, then, that different aspects of distance are crucial for determining how circumscribed neoliberalism will be in the concrete case. What we see in the two cases studied here, is a state that adopts a flexible and pragmatic distancing approach to mining operations within its territorial borders. It identified in Northland Resources a venture that could act as a motor for regional development, while treating LKAB as a reliable “cash cow” (e.g. Cheshire et al, 2014). Both cases have proved to hold only marginal interest for the state in the context of a national industrial policy. Interestingly, the ownership of LKAB has been used as an effective shield against direct state

22 responsibility, as the government has been able to refer to the ownership directives to avoid getting involved. Thus, the city transformation of Kiruna has been clearly demarcated as the responsibility of the company, while a possible rescue of the Pajala mine has been, officially at least, left to the LKAB board of directors.

What we see, then, is a logic of depoliticisation at work at several levels at the same time. There are of course practical incentives for a central state at any given moment to defer responsibility for local problems to local administrations, and neoliberal ideology and institutions both legitimate and facilitate such deferral (e.g. Hay, 2007). Both ideology and institutions reinforce this logic by requiring a certain conduct from the state, as business prerogatives position municipal governments as ‘stakeholders’ on a competitive market (Jessop, 2014). Thus, the market logic places vulnerable, peripheral communities in a position where they are forced to highlight their inability to function within the neoliberal, competitive market paradigm, while the state is both forced to “behave as if it has retreated” and is inclined to behave this way for practical reasons (Foster et al 2014, p.231). The resulting dynamic of repoliticisation from below and depoliticisation from above could be seen as a continuous negotiation between the state, municipal governments and other non-state actors to redraw or maintain the boundary that marks out the proper areas of intervention for the state (Jessop, 2014), where power relations are determined to a large extent by the distance between centre and periphery. In the following section, we will go on to describe this continuous negotiation in greater detail.

Repoliticisation in the shadow of hierarchy

The analysis validates the claim that under neoliberal power configurations, state capacities remain intact and are hidden from view, wielded through “subterranean” governance, rather than actually diminished (Hay 2014, p.307; also Harvey, 2006; Jessop, 2002; Ong, 2006). There are good reasons not to regard the withdrawal of state authority from the local goings-on in Kiruna and Pajala as an actual loss of state power but rather as a voluntary, pragmatic distancing approach that still leaves the capacity for state regulation through “metagovernance” intact (Dunsire, 1996; Jessop, 2003, 2014; Kelly, 2006). In the period covered here, successive governments set aside ideological considerations to retain their control over a natural resource that for a time provided

23 great profits for the state coffers. They also abetted a private venture with high potential and low state risk, all the while prioritising keeping their liabilities to a minimum. In its approach, the state has constituted itself as an “extra-economic force” in relation to the municipalities while retaining its capacity for regulation (Levien 2012, p.937; see also Bortolotti et al, 2013). The unusual speed of the permission process by which Northland Resource’s mining enterprise was approved, and the manifestation of official state support for mining sector expansion in the form of the Mineral Strategy of 2013 and the performative power in such formulations, provide evidence of the importance of “variegated” forms of sovereignty under neoliberalism, beyond the formal capacities of the state (Brenner et al, 2010; Jessop, 2002, 2003; Ong, 2010).

Thus there is, as described by Somerville (2005), a process at work that localises and centralises simultaneously, as the state retreats into a role of meta-governance by which it steers local partnerships and governance into performing centrally approved tasks. This double movement, rather than privatise profit and socialise risk as under an idealised version of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2006), localises risk and centralises profit, leaving the municipalities in highly vulnerable positions as they are subjected to the cold winds of world market volatility.

The deferral of nominal decision making processes and responsibility from the direct purview of the state, legitimised through neoliberal ideology, allows for a withdrawal of state liabilities and for state regulation in “the shadow of hierarchy” (Jessop 1997, p.575; Jessop, 2014). This withdrawal has however not been connected to a corresponding localisation of capacities to pockets of old school, Fordist accumulation regimes such as Pajala and Kiruna, which means that the decision by the state not to act holds just as much significance for the municipalities involved as any decision to be more actively engaged. In the space vacated by the retreating state, a sense of helplessness and frustration arise, shared by both these communities despite their differing fortunes.

In the peripheral mining towns of the North, the presence of the state is certainly felt, but it is so primarily through its absence. Here, politics become focused on drawing the state from its shadow, as it were, as frustrated city councillors perceive the need to “force” the representatives of the government to see their realities (Interview May 22, 2015; Interview June 2, 2016). These attempts to repoliticise, that is to “reintegrate depoliticised spheres into the political” (Jessop 2014, p.212) arise, we would argue,

24 partly out of frustration with “subterranean” governance (Hay 2014, p.307) and the refusal of the state to acknowledge its continued presence, and partly as a direct result of failure by these communities to manage their role as competitors on a free market (see Foster et al, 2014). As state intervention in the “social fixing” of capitalism can be seen to “partially compensate for the incompleteness of the pure capital relation, [securing] a relatively durable pattern of structural coherence in the handling of the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the capital relation” (Jessop 2001, p.13), the calls from Kiruna and Pajala for state assistance bear witness of a perceived lack of such a fix.

In addition, frustration should be understood as a response to the neoliberal form of metagovernance whereby the state can launch a policy, such as the Swedish Mineral Strategy, but back away from the responsibility for its implementation by ascribing a role for itself as mere facilitator rather than director. The actions of the state in relation to both Kiruna and Pajala reveal a willingness to facilitate resource extraction through limited state investments in boom times, but more importantly, it points to a lack of interest or belief in the long-term viability of the form of accumulation such mining towns represent (see also Radetzki, 2008)

Concluding words

Having started on a general level of theoretical considerations and then moved into concrete case studies, we will close this paper by drawing some conclusions, as related to our threefold purpose:

1) The Swedish state adopts a distancing, depoliticising approach in its regulation of peripheral, Fordist accumulation regimes, a mode of regulation that reinforces capitalism’s inherent logic of rendering the concrete abstract, and turning the physical, lived place into abstract space (Harvey, 1996; Lefebvre, 1991). In parallel to Marx’s observation that “capital is indifferent to the particular nature of every sphere of production” (Marx 1990, p.1012), the Swedish state has proven to be indifferent to the particular effects of its transfer from one mode of regulation to another in peripheral regions of production. This relation between centre and periphery should be understood

25 in a physical geographic, a social as well as a metaphorical sense (relating to industrial policy).

2) Repoliticisation occurs as a response to state withdrawal of capacities and deferral of liabilities at different geographical and institutional scales (Hay, 2007; Jessop, 2014; Kuzemko, 2014). It results, first, from frustration from local governments and other non- state actors with “subterranean” governance (Hay 2014, p.307) by a state whose powers remain intact; secondly, from attempts to highlight the inherently “flawed” character of the market; and, thirdly, from frustration with the depoliticised approach whereby state policy is not followed by state practice. The dynamic between depoliticisation and efforts to repoliticise can be understood as a continuous boundary negotiation, where distance between centre and periphery largely determines the outcome.

Furthermore, this means that depoliticisation constitutes a continuation of politics by other means in two ways: a) Metagovernance, by which the state steers actors and agencies to deliver results within the frame of the state agenda (Foster et al, 2014; Jessop, 1997; Somerville, 2005); b) The attempts by agencies that have been politicised by depoliticisation, i.e. have been delegated liabilities that are not proportionate to their capacities, to “reintegrate depoliticised spheres into the political” (Jessop 2014, p.212).

3) In contrast to the arguments of protesters against the Swedish Mineral Strategy of 2013 and state mining policy, the state regulation of mining that has been revealed in this investigation is very far from a sustained and focused support for the mining industry (cf. Kirsch, 2014). Rather, it is an approach in which the state gives rhetorical support for mining ventures and state involvement, but its ultimate priority is to limit its liabilities. This is not a mode of regulation that can win much support from opponents of the mining industry, since it entails a state retreat from responsibility for the environmental and social risks associated with mining, nor from the mining companies and mining communities that look for guarantees of state support in the future mining busts that will inevitably come.

In the absence of a strongly involved state, the established capacity of the peripheral community to limit the devaluation, and associated environmental degradation, wreaked by the capitalist winds of value destruction will be crucial for the local, concrete result of crises. In this sense, the cases of Pajala and Kiruna mirror developments on a global level where neoliberal depoliticisation plays out with results

26 that have certain “family resemblances”, allowing us to speak of a distinct mode of neoliberal regulation (Jessop 2001, p.12). On a very general level, the vulnerable positions of peripheral communities in relation to a centre that controls the money supply, has been made abundantly clear during the last decade within the Eurozone, with relative winners and losers sorted out in accordance with their ability to adjust to centrally ordered austerity. In the specific case of mining, Pajala and Kiruna mirror a development identified by Bridge (2004; see also Hurst, 2015) whereby neoliberal mining policy leads to dramatically rising investments in new regions and only relatively small investment increases in established mining regions during boom times, but severe devaluations in the former and relatively smooth landings for the latter in times of crisis.

Too conclude then, it is an image of the Swedish welfare state that differs significantly from the established one that emerges from the present study. The distancing logic that we have found to be so characteristic of the neoliberal mode of regulation seems worryingly ill fitted for the kinds of infrastructural and social transformations that are likely to be required in the decades to come.

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