Responsibility Without Obligation? : An Exploratory Study of State Accountability for Municipal Crime Prevention Work

In a democracy, it is important that public actors can be held accountable for their actions. Accountability involves the ability to scrutinize public authorities to make sure that they carry out their political and organizational responsibilities in a legal and effective way. For a democracy to earn its legitimacy, there should be certain mechanisms in place to control public power. Nearly two years ago, a new law (2023:196) was introduced in Sweden, giving municipalities a statuatory responsibility for crime prevention. This is a complex task that has not traditionally fallen within the municipalities’ area of responsibility. At the same time, there is no clear national accountability system or mechanism in place that checks how municipalities conduct their crime prevention work (apart from certain internal municipal audit functions). The aim of this thesis is to examine and deepen the understanding of formal ways the state can hold municipalities accountable, and to explore whether informal or informal forms of accountability also exist within the area of crime prevention. This study also looks into the conditions required to build a more structured system for accountability in the future, and what challenges such systems may face. The results indicate that the criteria in Bovens’ theory of ‘accountability as a mechanism’ are not fully met, because there are some key components in that criteria that are missing. Because of this, there is no clear or formal system for the state to hold municipalities accountable, based on Bovens’ criteria. However, certain aspects of informal accountability can be observed, such as feedback- and evaluation-mechanisms, as well as cooperation based on trust-based management. These results are followed by a more in-depth discussion of the democratic, organizational and relational challenges that come with holding municipalities accountable in the Swedish public administration system.