Policy clash and climate policy backlash.

Socioeconomically efficient and long-term sustainable provision of transport for citizens and business across Sweden is governed through the transport political goals. The goals hold that function (accessibility) and impact (environment and climate) can be achieved coherently. Realising accessibility across the country has however meant subsidising regional airports and flight routes, a strategy which has, on the one hand, come under attack for its incoherence with national emissions targets, and on the other hand, been deemed completely necessary to ensure the liberal ethos of free-movement and that ‘all of Sweden should live’. This example constitutes a ‘policy clash’ between targets of function and impact and the meeting of coherently formulated but potentially incoherent, albeit equally legitimate, goals. Follow-up of the goals show that the transport sector still struggles with emission rates, and that there are differences of accessibility resulting in some regions developing negatively or at a slower pace than the rest. This raises questions of how to govern with coherency and regarding fairness and legitimacy of the implementation. This paper is based on a case study of two regional airports, one in the north and one in the south with different preconditions, and 20 semi-structured interviews with state- and non-state actors engaged with the policy issue. The results show that vertical incoherence exacerbates a perceived ‘us vs. them’ which impacts legitimacy and cements the perception of climate policies as an urban endeavour unfit for rural realities, even amongst actors who believed in the urgency of a transition. The perceived lack of fairness raises questions of distributional and procedural justice and provides important cues for understanding climate policy backlash and the political factors such as trade-offs, winners and losers, otherwise often hidden behind the presumption that coherent policies lead to coherent outcomes.