Emmelin Lars, Cherp Aleh

The National Environmental Objectives (NEOs) adopted by Swedish Parliament in 2001 and proclaimining that major environmental problems should be solved within a generation are often portrayed as good practice of a concrete yet visionary sustainability strategy. The 16 NEOs fall into two groups. The first group is a positive reformulation of existing environmental problems based on well established scientific evidence. The second group contains utopian landscape goals which are more visionary but also more difficult to operationalize, especially for local authorities which play major part in the implementation of the NEOs in Sweden. The system that mixes these two sets of goals based on two different paradigms of sustainable development inherits the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither. A more effective approach would be to separate these two sustainability governance approaches into complementary but distinct systems..