Capacity in municipalities : Infrastructures, maintenance debts and ways of overcoming a run-to-failure mentality

• There is a growing maintenance debt of ageing and critical infrastructures in many municipalities in European welfare states. In this article, we use the multidimensional concept of local capacity as a point of departure to analyse how and in what ways Swedish municipalities work with the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including municipal road networks as well as water and sewage systems. For the road networks, maintenance is generally outsourced to contractors and there is also a large degree of tolerance for various standards on different road segments within and between the municipalities. Less used road segments are not as prioritised as those with heavy traffic. For the water and sewage systems, in-house technical capacity is needed as differences in water quality are not tolerated. Economies of scale mean that in-house capacity is translated into the creation of inter-municipal bodies. As different forms of capacities tend to reinforce each other, municipal capacity builds up over time in circular movements. These results add knowledge to current research by pointing to the ways municipalities are overcoming a run-to-failure mentality by building capacity to pay off the infrastructural maintenance debt.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

critical infrastructure

local capacity

maintenance

municipal roads

water and sewage

critical infrastructure; maintenance; municipal roads; local capacity; water and sewage

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)