Collaboration for Local Economic Development: Business Networks,Politics and Universities in Two Swedish Cities

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.