ABSTRACT
SEA in Swedish spatial planning does not seem to live up to either the formal requirements of national legislation or the SEA Directive, or to some of the most basic expectations that the international SEA community attach to this process. The message of this article is that SEA in Swedish spatial planning suffers from a number of fundamental problems, i.e. problems that cannot wholly be remedied by better guidance or simple information or even more stringent supervision and follow-up or sanctions. My argument is that SEA is partly based on normative assumptions not supported by theory or evidence which can be seen as the ‘myths of SEA’ (Emmelin, 2006), some of which are discussed as ‘the assumptions behind SEA’ (Loayza, 2011). The state of the art of SEA is partly a function of how systems are designed, but ultimately an assessment of the state of SEA must rest on a discussion of how the theoretical system interacts with the implementation structures and context in which it operates (Emmelin, 1998). Sweden affords a good case study of some of these problems. As Bond and Pope (2012) note, the country context is very important to the state of any impact assessment. While some of the problems of SEA in Sweden are the result of such contextual factors, it is my contention that they also illustrate more general and fundamental issues.
