Enhancing municipal capabilities in the shadow of the war in Ukraine

Russia’s war against Ukraine clearly highlights the critical importance of civil defense in ensuring societal resilience. In Sweden, much of this responsibility rests with the municipalities: securing access to water and electricity, protecting vulnerable populations, maintaining core welfare services, and safeguarding the supply chains they are accountable for.

Photo by Taine Noble on Unsplash

About the project

Existing research, public inquiries, guidelines, and recommendations address the capabilities municipalities need to build, and how to do it. However, only rarely do they examine why municipalities act at different speeds or make different priorities.
The starting point of this project is simple: without decisions, there is no capability development.

We need to generate new knowledge about how experiences, information, and recommendations are, or are not, translated into actual decisions to enhance civil defense capabilities. The aim is to better understand the decision-making processes and to identify which factors and actors within and around municipalities are critical to such decisions.

This understanding can help create new models for developing and steering civil defense capabilities across Sweden.

Research team