Sjötransporter och regional omvandling : Regleringen av den norrländska vintersjöfarten 1940-1975

Sammanfattning: This licentiate thesis investigates the decision-making process behind the regulation of winter shipping along the coast of the northern part of Sweden, the Norrland region, in the period 1940-1975. The licentiate thesis examines two aspects of this decision-making process. First, how the regulations in the field of winter shipping were designed in the period. Second, this work examines the underlying factors behind this regulatory outcome on the premise that the regulatory design in the field was the result of an interaction between the regulating actors in the government and their political and economic institutional context. As for the first issue, it is demonstrated that the period 1940-1975 was characterised by a regulatory ambition to expand winter shipping along the coast of Norrland. This meant that the government made substantial investments in ice-breakers during the period, which gradually expanded the shipping season until the target of year-round shipping even to the northernmost ports was established in the first part of the 1970s. Accordingly, those dues for ice-breaker services proposed by several committees that investigated the issue were never introduced. Instead, government-led ice-breaking has served to compensate Norrland as a peripheral region for its relatively high transport costs. Regarding the second issue, it is showed that the decision-making process was influenced by developments at different policy levels of the government hierarchy. In the period 1940-1964, when a public authority within the maritime sector emerged and was consolidated, developments at the maritime sector level affected the decision-making process to a large extent. In turn, the period after 1964 witnessed a change in government policy towards the Norrland region as a more interventionist regional and industrial policy than earlier was implemented. This meant that the decision-making process to a larger extent was influenced by factors originating from a macro policy level. During the decision-making process, actors at both the maritime sector level and the macro level emphasized the importance of government-regulated winter shipping for the regional industrialization of the Norrland region in terms that reflected the aims and interests of their policy levels. In this respect, actors in the maritime sector pointed to the role of winter shipping as a trade policy instrument while actors who represented the interests of regional development policy and industrial policy considered the expansion of winter shipping as crucial in achieving the general ambition to create a geographically egalitarian welfare state, characterised by high levels of growth and low unemployment.