Interaction Between Government and Business to Shape Sustainable Markets

In market economies production and consumption are dependent on exchanges between market actors providing and using resources. We argue, in line with the “whole-of-government” perspective, that interaction between market actors and policy actors are crucial to achieve sustainable development goals, in our case climate mitigation. Technical, economic and policy innovations are needed for the market to be able to perform fossil-free market exchanges. We use “roadmaps” emanating from a non-traditional Swedish government committee named “Fossil-free Sweden” (FFS) and the government’s climate action plan as empirical focus. The roadmaps for specific industries/sectors are developed by market actors and submitted by FFS to government. With the aim of furthering the knowledge of how interaction between government and business promotes sustainable market exchange, we adopt a conceptual model that identifies three categories of market practices; representational, normalizing and exchange practices; that are interlinked by translation. Our policy practice approach refers to a “whole of government” perspective. We analyse one of the roadmaps, “Construction”, in terms of how policy innovations, as identified in the climate action plan, may promote technical and economic innovations and development of fossil-free market exchanges.