Planning and Perceptions: Exploring Municipal Officials’ Views on Residents’ Climate Preparedness

Abstract

In Sweden, municipalities and municipal planning are central to the government’s preparedness for climate-related risks, as municipalities are the organizations that will largely have to adapt to and prepare for climate change. However, there is little government guidance in the form of clearly formulated policies, policy objectives, and detailed regulations to support municipalities in this work. In practice, municipal officials are tasked with developing climate preparedness, including facilitating citizen awareness of the need to prepare for climate-related risks. By exploring the local level of Swedish public administration, which in practice has to deal with different and sometimes divergent understandings of a situation and who should manage it, the paper explores the implications of officials’ meaning-making about local risk governance. An exploratory approach to risk governance and meaning-making rationality is used to examine Swedish municipal officials’ views of citizens’ climate crisis preparedness and the motives and barriers they perceive the citizens to have in developing this preparedness. An interview study is conducted with 23 officials in 5 municipalities. Based on the results, the paper discusses the implications of the perception that citizens have no constructive role to play in the work to better prepare municipalities for climate change. The paper concludes by discussing how officials’ meaning-making rationality needs to be addressed in the development of robust climate preparedness.

1. Introduction

We are facing a global climate crisis that is acting at the local level. Climate change has already caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damage to both nature and people [1]. Extreme weather events—such as heat waves, intense rainfall, drought, and tropical cyclones—are becoming more common and increasing in intensity. These events are not completely avoidable; therefore, the challenge lies in how to decrease the vulnerability and increase the resilience of socioecological systems to minimize the adverse effects of such extreme events. In this discussion, vulnerability and resilience at the community level have increasingly come into focus [2]. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1], however, finds that planning for climate adaptation is limited across Europe, and that there are several barriers to it, including the lack of citizens’ engagement and preparedness.

Among the European countries, Sweden is often seen as a frontrunner for climate adaptation. In 2018, the Swedish government adopted a climate adaptation strategy, the objective of which is to “develop a long-term sustainable and robust society that actively meets climate change by reducing vulnerabilities and seizing opportunities” [3]. As Sweden has a decentralized responsibility for climate adaptation, municipalities play a central role and shoulder much of the responsibility for climate crisis preparedness [4]. Apart from planning for its own preparedness for extreme weather events, a municipality is also supposed to encourage increased preparedness among other local actors and the public. In this way, each Swedish municipality offers a case of local risk governance. A study of risk governance practices found that the conception of risk derives from situated processes of meaning creation where actors interact to establish relationships between risk factors and risk objects [5]. These collective processes show that at the heart of risk governance is what people actually do (when participating in meetings or inspection tours, going through checklists, answering questions, or approving contracts) and that this behavior heavily depends on how actors have learned to recognize and trust each other’s expertise and responsibility.

A central theme in the Swedish preparedness policy is residents’ home preparedness; however, the policy goal that households and citizens should develop home preparedness, that is, develop the capacity to handle different kinds of crises, is not followed by any detailed regulation on how (through which means) this goal should be attained [6]. Thus, there is space for municipal planning and municipal officials to better formulate understanding and activities surrounding this matter. Municipal officials are a kind of “street-level bureaucrat”, interpreting public policies and developing strategies for implementing them [7,8,9,10]. In this process, municipal officials must consider how to understand specific risk situations and the actors involved. The actions of various actors have a significant impact on how an event unfolds. Their responses are intimately linked to the way in which actors assess the credibility and legitimacy of the organizations dealing with these risks [11]. Hence, how different actors view each other is an important aspect of risk governance and preparedness.

For all risk governance activities, this process involves discursive efforts to invent, shape, and negotiate the meaning of a particular issue [12,13]. This includes not only the topic (crisis preparedness) but also what the problem is (insufficient crisis preparedness among citizens) and what kind of social intervention is most relevant to solve this problem (e.g., information and knowledge distribution). To support and increase citizens’ home preparedness, municipality officials look for reasons why citizens either develop or do not develop their crisis preparedness. By making the situation understandable to themselves, municipality officials create opportunities for action; that is, they can develop and expand activities that they believe motivate citizens to increase their climate preparedness. Thus, this understanding is not separate from the professional activities and practices they pursue. Rather, these understandings guide municipality officials in what steps should be taken to support citizens’ development in terms of their crisis preparedness.

This paper aims to explore Swedish municipal officials’ perceptions of citizens’ preparedness for extreme weather events and the implications of these understandings on municipal planning and local risk governance in practice. The study is designed as a case study, examining municipalities of different sizes to provide a broad understanding of municipal officials’ views and perceptions. By exploring how municipal officials view motives and barriers to citizens’ preparedness, it investigates how officials’ meaning-making rationality shapes the relations and interactions in local risk governance. This has significant implications, as their perceptions of citizens preparedness—whether correct or not—influence their actions and strategies for climate adaptation. By focusing on the operational level—the officials that directly meet and communicate with citizens—this study highlights an issue that is often are overlooked in research, namely the lowest level in the administrative which, in practice, must deal with different and sometimes divergent understandings of a situation and of who should manage it.

This paper is structured in five sections, including the current introduction section. The second section develops the theoretical approach of risk governance and meaning-making rationality. The third section presents the study design with case selection, materials, and methods. The fourth section presents the results, showing how municipal officials understand citizens’ motives and barriers to preparedness. The fifth and concluding section puts these results in a wider context and discusses their implications for risk governance.

2. Theoretical Approach: Risk Governance and Meaning-Making Rationality

Many modern risks, such as climate change, are hard to govern because they are complex and embedded in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and often also contestation. Risk governance has emerged as an effort to understand and manage complex, ambiguous, and contested risks in a more feasible and efficient way [13,14,15,16]. In short, risk governance is an umbrella term used for steering practices that aim to manage risks that connect actors to decision-making and implementation [17]. It is important to recognize that all governance processes are historically, spatially, and institutionally situated, making both the actors involved and their understanding of each other core issues [5]. Focusing on municipal planning and local risk governance implies a need for a contextual understanding of the risks and the challenges they pose in each situation [5,18]. Despite the widespread global discussion on climate change, it is rarely society at large but rather specific organizations and professionals that must understand specific situations and what to do about them. Therefore, to improve risk management practices, it is important to understand the institutional, professional, and practical arrangements that structure their logic [4].

Stakeholders likely have different interpretations of risk depending on varying priorities, motivating them to act in various ways. A characteristic of human action is that actors assign meaning to what they do [19]. In this sense, human beings are guided by meaning-making rationality, as they are always looking for reasons behind human actions and decisions [20]. Actors justify their behavior by providing reasons that make their actions meaningful for themselves. Explaining organizations and peoples’ behavior is carried out by ascribing certain reasons behind this behavior. These ascriptions work performatively; they not only provide an understanding of a situation but also generate action. The definition of a situation, the perceived reason behind a social problem, and the remedy related to it may on many occasions guide action. This approach has led to a growing interest in studying risk governance in practice, including the practical and contextual reasoning of the professionals involved in this work [5]. Basically, by making other actors see the world according to a preferred frame, the regulatory actors, in our case the municipalities, may generate legitimacy for what risks should be seen as most serious and what responses are seen as most appropriate [21].

The process of giving meaning to actions is a critical part of any actors’ attempt to handle the uncertainty and complexity of risk [13]. Despite its importance for risk governance in practice, the creation of a dominating view among the affected parties is seldom a planned process. Such creation likely consists of small, unconscious acts. Unfolding from a standpoint, i.e., a frame of reference and identity, the practice of this process consists of individuals trying to give meaning to a complex reality [22]. A study of actors involved in Swedish governance processes showed that even the use of mandatory formal risk analysis, identification, and classification is an intricate social process of negotiation that seems to rely more on the social status of the actors involved than on systematic, scientific assessment procedures [5]. It found that more often than not, managers appear to attend to risk issues through sense-making processes based on rule of thumb, ad hoc solutions, experiences, and routines. The organizations and individuals involved in the framing of a risk cannot aim to find an absolute truth about it; instead, they try to make sense of uncertainties by creating a sufficiently comprehensive story to sustain the organizations’ motivation and strive towards long-term goals [22], ultimately justifying the organizations’ action and behavior by making such aspects meaningful for themselves. As meaning-making rationalities guide professional actors’ risk conceptualization and the communication thereof, it is of relevance to understand the discursive effort to invent, shape, and negotiate the meaning of a particular issue in any given situation of risk governance [12].

To understand risk governance in practice, we need to explore the practical and contextual reasoning of “street-level” risk managers [6,23], who in this case are civil officials within municipalities. The way in which these civil officials assign meaning to what they and other actors do is at the core of obtaining insight into why things play out as they do. In their definition of a situation, at the heart of both the perceived reason behind a social problem and the remedy related to it lies the expression of the meaning-making rationality that makes their action both meaningful and justifiable to them. When the municipality officials in turn explain other actors’ behavior, they do so by ascribing certain reasons to the actors as well. These ascriptions work performatively, as they not only provide an understanding of a situation but may also generate civil officials’ action. In this paper, we explore meaning-making rationality and discuss the implications it may have for risk governance in practice.

3. Materials and Methods

The design of this study is an explorative case study [24,25,26]. By selecting a case such as Sweden, which is a country with policy ambition towards climate adaptation and preparedness and where municipalities are seen as crucial in this pursuit, information can be gained about a task that is still in early stages in many other countries. Even if these results are not easily transferable to other contexts [27], important lessons can be drawn for other actors working in the field of climate risk preparedness.

The material used herein is drawn from an interview study focusing on risk-related professional expertise, namely, municipal officials with the task and mandate to conduct or suggest relevant interventions for their organization. The informants were identified based on their responsibility for and active part in working with climate-related risk preparedness. Using snowball sampling, we aimed to cover the professional roles that each municipality deemed relevant for climate change-related preparedness within their municipal administrative organization. Most of the informants hold higher positions (e.g. strategists and managers) in central administrations. A handful work with security issues at the operation level.

The municipal officials were drawn from five different municipalities of varying sizes. The municipalities represented the three different categories of municipalities in Sweden, namely the metropolitan area, city area, town area and rural area. Since there are very few officials involved in crisis preparedness in rural municipalities (due to these having small populations and few municipal employees), two municipalities were selected from this category. As the municipalities are organized differently, not least depending on size, the number of relevant informants varied between the municipalities. We do not provide detailed information about the characteristics of the municipalities, as they were chosen not for comparative reasons but to obtain a broader empirical material to explore.

Interviews were conducted with municipal officials responsible for climate-related preparedness in their municipalities. Altogether, twenty interviews were conducted with twenty-three municipal officials. On one occasion, an interview was conducted with two officials, and on another occasion with three people, according to their wishes. The interviews were conducted between September 2021 and September 2022 (see Supplementary Material File S1 for more information on the composition of the interview study and for the interview guide).

The interviews were semi-structured and allowed for follow-up questions and the expansion of topics that emerged during the interview [28]. This method was selected for its suitability for unfolding argumentation and gaining an inside perspective on interviewees’ understanding and reasoning. The interview guide centered on themes of risk perception, the role of citizens, the division of responsibilities, risk and vulnerability assessment and effect/outcomes. The interviews were conducted in Swedish, and the quotations in the results section were translated by the authors. All subjects gave their informed consent before they participated in the study. As the informants were interviewed in their capacity as professional public officials, no ethical approval was required according to Swedish standards.

Due to the pandemic (and then for equivalence), the interviews were carried out digitally (through Microsoft Teams). The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. A contextualized thematic analysis was conducted [29] using NVivo 12 Pro software to analyze the qualitative data. In the analysis of the material, particular attention was paid to thematizing everything that was said about the perceptions of citizens. Throughout the analysis, the method of meaning condensation [28] was used, where lengthy statements were condensed into concise summaries that conveyed the core message of the original content. These statements were then used to construct codes covering different themes. In this work, the content of a particular code was constantly related to the overall content of the interview. A total of 14 codes and 21 subcodes were constructed, of which 7 were primarily used in this paper, namely those of “municipal responsibility”, “citizen responsibility”, “crisis management organization” (subcodes: preparedness vs. crisis; inward questioning and learning; size-specific reflections), “citizen understanding” (subcodes: expressions of ambivalence; burden/reliability, resource; capacity for preparedness), “risk object” (subcodes: the population; infrastructure; the municipalities’ personnel; communication systems), “risk perceptions” (subcodes: social amplification; social construction; technically defined), and “support to enhance public preparedness” (subcodes: digitalization; communication). Based on these codes, officers’ perceptions on citizens’ barriers and motivations for risk preparedness were identified.

The presentation of the results includes interview quotes used to enhance clarity and promote a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

4. Results

In the following section, the municipal officials’ views of the motives and barriers for preparedness among citizens are presented. The general statement made by most of the interviewed municipal officials is that citizens have too low a level of home preparedness. We will analyze this statement by exploring what meaning-making rationality the officials associate with it. As will be shown, the reason for the low level of home preparedness, according to the interviews, is that citizens have a low level of risk perception, a poor customer relationship with public services, and a lack of agency. These factors, according to the officials, make the residents rather incapable of dealing with risk preparedness. However, there is potential; the most common reasons why citizens are motivated to develop home preparedness are, according to the officials, to reduce their own vulnerability and to be solidaric with the community. These ideas are developed below.

4.1. Barriers: Low Level of Risk Perception, Poor Customer Relationships, and Lack of Agency

Ideally, the interviewees want to see that citizens maintain a level of home preparedness sufficient to sustain the household for about one week in the case of a crisis, allowing the authorities to focus fully on managing the situation. However, the municipality officials argue that most citizens fail to act on their responsibility for three main reasons: low risk perception, customer relations to the municipality, and a lack of agency.

4.1.1. Low Risk Perception

According to the officials, their residents have a notably low risk perception that is caused by lack of experience with extreme events, disregard for risks that do not directly and obviously affect themselves, and a lack of understanding of complex risks. Low priority and perceived security levels are seen as a deadly combination for home preparedness, as illustrated by the following quote:

‘The last generation has lived their entire lives in peace and prosperity. They have faced neither war nor pandemic. People get comfortable and aren’t in a rush to prepare for something that may never happen.’

(head of department/security coordinator, health and care unit, town area).

A repeated argument is that Swedish society has had a perceived level of safety for such an extended period that both organizations and individuals choose to act indifferently to risks and are prioritizing other issues. Or, as frankly put by a food safety inspector, “People just don’t care if it doesn’t affect them directly; as long as they get their coffee, they couldn’t care less that the entire global food system is a mess”. Following this argument, the municipality officers argue that it is particularly difficult for climate risks to motivate citizens to take preventive actions because these risks are so abstract. This is illustrated by the following quote:

‘One of the greatest challenges [with preparedness communication] is to make this super complex issue [of climate change] something feasible for common people, to make the connection to basic preparedness and tinned food.’

(security strategist, central administration, metropolitan area).

By arguing that residents lack the experience and knowledge necessary to grasp the complexity of climate change, officials present a meaning-making rationality towards maintaining a hierarchical relationship between experts and citizens.

4.1.2. Customer Relationships

Municipality officials generally claim that citizens, particularly those in urban areas, want risks to be managed in such a way that the individual is not affected by them at all. An official working in a metropolitan area demonstrates this idea in the following quote:

‘When we evaluate events, the comments suggest that it is the municipality’s obligation to make sure nothing ever happens. It may sound weird, but there is a very low acceptance level that extreme weather events occur and have consequences. We have tried to mitigate the consequences, but the citizens want no consequences at all.’

(security strategist, central administration, metropolitan area).

Here, the municipality officials make two general assumptions: (1) that the public places unrealistically high expectations on the public service and (2) that the citizens demonstrate an inability to see their own responsibility in risk management. Taking these assumptions into consideration, it appears that officials understand the citizens’ self-image as that of a customer. A customer has individual rights in relation to the services he or she is paying for but does not share the responsibility to uphold these services. It is, therefore, possible to separate one’s own needs and wants from those of society and dismiss calls from the municipality (if at all noticing them in the constant noise of information) as “someone else’s problem”. The customer is not a necessary part of society’s functions; rather, he or she is purely the receiver of its outcomes. It is only when the service is not functioning that the customer has an incitement to act, the first step being to alert the provider that the service is malfunctioning. The security strategist quoted above, like most other informants from the same municipality, repeatedly mentions the drastic increase in the number of calls from citizens that the municipality received during the latest period of heavy rain, using this as evidence of how low the level of individual preparedness is among their citizens. Similar anecdotes are used by officials from all municipalities in this interview study to illustrate how dependent their citizens are on the public services and how high the expectations are on the municipality to provide these services regardless of weather conditions. One official is particularly direct in the following statement:

‘People have a huge expectation of the municipality to provide. They are like, “We pay taxes, so you should fix this for us”.’

(head of civil protection, rural area).

It seems as if citizens’ home preparedness becomes a task that challenges the service provider–customer relationship and opens a less clear division of responsibilities that, according to the officials, not all citizens are willing to meet. This motivates officials to stress each citizen’s individual responsibility in their public risk communication.

4.1.3. Lack of Agency

Some municipality officials argue that society is becoming increasingly complex and that people, especially in urban areas, lack agency in the systems on which they depend. This is exemplified by the following quote:

‘It is more of a problem [with available measures] in the town. What if the heating system is out in an apartment building… it quickly becomes a great problem for everyone to stay warm. What can they do? They can’t start a bonfire…’

(security coordinator, central administration, rural area).

The municipality officials that express similar concerns to this in direct response to what they see as a dominant view among colleagues regarding citizens being careless or clueless. A few municipality officials question the internal logics of the national organization of risk management, as they see a pattern in which socioeconomically underprivileged groups are disadvantaged:

‘There is a constant request that we should put 22 million SEK into increasing curfews to reduce the risk of flooding during a 1000-year rain. Meanwhile, no one asks us what we are doing to reduce the number of children living in poverty. The tradition and narrative in risk management makes [the security sector] focus on some technically defined risks […]. Poor children do not have a strong voice, but people with basements do.’

(head of security, central administration, city area).

This quote also points to different actors being able to use different resources to interact with and claim the rights of authorities, as well as personal resources used to reduce vulnerability. A few municipality officials, including the head of security quoted above, express difficulties in involving citizens in risk management, as the views that would be expressed would tend to represent privileged positions and not the most vulnerable groups. The most common view among the interviewees is, however, that it is unnecessary to involve citizens, as they have rather little to contribute to the management of risks. The officials argue that the outcome of public participation will be biased towards individual interests and that the officials in such forums face a greater challenge in controlling the narrative. On a similar note, municipality officials are greatly concerned that disinformation is increasingly spread to obscure authorized risk information. If citizens are misled and manipulated by disinformation, this can have a strong negative effect on the work and legitimacy of risk governance and municipal planning.

The different arguments that officials used to describe citizens’ barriers to climate risk-related preparedness and the frequency of these arguments are summarized in

Table 1. Municipal officials’ views on citizens’ barriers to preparedness for climate-related extreme events (in bracket the number of respondents that stress this barrier).

Type of Barrier:	How the Barrier Is Described in the Material:
Low risk perception
Low priority (5)	Prioritize putting time, resources, and commitment into other issues.
Perceived security (4)	“Nothing will happen to me”. A low perception of risk due to limited exposure.
Ignorance (4)	“Doesn’t affect me”. Not enough knowledge about climate risks.
Abstract risk (3)	If the risk is unknown, hard to clearly identify, uncertain, or complex, it is hard for the citizens to understand and act on it. Instead, their focus is on well-established risks.
Dull or indifferent to threats (2)	Too much risk information in society makes citizen indifferent to threats. They cannot be expected to act on every risk.
Customer relationship
Overconfidence in the public services (8)	A wrongful or exaggerated belief that the public services will also provide services in times of crisis. Often described as a customer relation based on tax payment to service provider.
Detachment from society (6)	Not feeling involved in the society, including the Swedish contingency plan. Managing risks is someone else’s problem and responsibility.
Lack of agency
Lack of resources (4)	Limited resources to reduce vulnerability.
Lack of source criticism/disinformation (4)	Non-desirable rationalities and activities based on messages from non-verified sources.
Exclusion (2)	Inequity and segregation exclude some groups of citizens from information sharing, planning processes, and decision making. This may affect their chance to reduce vulnerability, but also makes the risk management officers ignorant to their conditions of vulnerability, possibly exposing them to further risks.
Unclear responsibilities (2)	Unclear what to expect from oneself and others.

. The meaning-making argument seems to be that citizens lack either the interest or willingness to actively participate in processes that require societal and public interest to be placed ahead of their own individual interests.

To conclude, the three dominating views that the municipality officials express about citizens’ barriers to preparedness include a variety of complementary and sometimes conflicting arguments about who citizens are as a subject. The baseline idea seems to be that residents are not willing to or capable of undertaking the responsibility of preparedness. This indicates a meaning-making rationale that emphasizes an expert–layperson relationship in risk management and fails to motivate citizens to engage in more inclusive acts of risk governance or planning, as the municipal officials do not believe that the citizens are not suited for the task.

4.2. Motives: Vulnerability and Responsibility

Next, we will present the arguments that municipality officials use to describe what motivates citizens’ preparedness for climate-related extreme events. In comparison with the views on barriers, there is more uniformity among the officials’ views on motives. Two dominating views of motivation emerge: to reduce one’s own vulnerability and to be a responsible and solidaric citizen.

4.2.1. To Reduce Own Vulnerability

The officials make a clear link between preparedness and vulnerability. Even if this correlation is not conclusive according to risk perception research (see [30] for an overview), it seems to be a guiding principle for the officials. If people are aware of how extreme weather can affect them, they will prepare better, the officials argue. Most of the interviewed officials back this statement by claiming that they observe a greater interest in risk management and more enforced priority to preparedness both internally and externally after the occurrence of an extreme event.

The municipal officials argue that risks with known and concrete effects at the individual level motivate citizens to act for home preparedness; however, climate change is not such a risk. Municipality officials see extreme weather, such as cloudbursts and heatwaves, as the most tangible effect of climate change and, therefore, mainly use extreme weather in risk communication to citizens, even at the risk of confirming some blind spots that the public may have regarding other types of climate-related risks. However, since Swedish authorities have an “all-hazards approach” to preparedness [31], officials claim that it is not crucial for citizen preparedness to be aware of all possible risks and their effects.

In relation to extreme weather events, the municipality officials describe the citizens’ risk objects to be (1) property and (2) the health of vulnerable loved ones. One’s own well-being is presumed to be a more manageable factor in relation to these events. A security strategist recalls the increased amount of phone calls the municipality received during a heatwave one summer:

‘Well, they are very worried, not for their own sake, but for their elderly relatives. This became very clear to us in the last heatwave. The calls were on behalf of someone else. People were like, “I can manage, we bought a fan. However, my mother, she is in retirement home X…”.’

(security strategist, central administration, metropolitan area).

The quote relates to control and available measures; several municipality officials point towards the need for easy ways to reduce vulnerability, such as having a fan. For people already in need of assistance, the situation may be more complex, and the division of responsibility between the relatives and the caregiver may be less clear. Recalling that the customer relationship was previously identified as a barrier, the abovementioned example may illustrate how a customer uses available measures by calling public service providers to point out weaknesses in a service they provide.

The above quotation illustrates that the notion of vulnerability needs to be linked to available measures that can reduce the risk or its effects. The dominant view among the municipality officials seems to be that for extreme weather, there are measures available to increase preparedness and reduce vulnerability, at least to some extent. “Anyone can follow the weather broadcast”, stated a risk communication manager from a metropolitan area.

Numerous municipality officials claim that the population needs to practice crisis scenarios (such as fire drills) to know how to act in case of an emergency. Even so, they have no suggestions for how the public could be involved in such exercises. Rather, they wish for the existence of manageable, repeated actual events that can increase the population’s risk perception and foster preparedness to reduce vulnerability in case of greater ones:

‘I cannot deny having thought that we need a middle-sized crisis to practice on so that people realize that the public resources are not enough and that we need to help each other out to make it work. Everyone needs to step up and dig in. Yet, one can’t wish for a “practice disaster” …’

(security coordinator, environmental unit, metropolitan area).

Please note that in this quote, the municipality officer expresses an expectation that the citizens should take responsibility for the common good in case of a crisis. This brings us to the other dominating view of citizens’ motivation, namely that the individual feels as if he or she is part of society and has responsibilities as a citizen for both himself or herself and others.

4.2.2. To Be a Responsible and Solidaric Citizen

In addition to the motivation to ensure their own safety, the most expressed form of motivation for citizens, according to the municipality officials, is to ensure the safety of society as a whole. The following quote illustrates this point:

‘It is positive when citizens activate themselves for preparedness. If they prepare more, they will be affected less. Thus, fewer people need to turn to the municipality for support’

(urban planner, municipal district administration, metropolitan area).

Other examples include more overarching reasoning, such as the following quote, which discusses the role of citizens in the level of national preparedness:

‘Citizens are the backbone of the civil contingency. It is how we mentally prepare for and are ready to manage a crisis that will save the nation.’

(head of security, central administration, rural area).

Another head of security emphasizes that people in general have a strong will to take responsibility and do the right thing. This official, as well as many others, uses the Swedish COVID-19 strategy—in which the authorities mainly gave recommendations—as an example of citizens’ will to take responsibility for oneself and society at large. A colleague of theirs made the following statement:

‘During the entire COVID-pandemic, Swedes followed the Public Health Agency’s recommendations. Other countries enforced laws, but Swedes followed recommendations. Likely because we know the authority wants what is best for us.’

(head of department, environment and health protection, city area).

In the material, there are several similar quotes arguing that Swedish citizens in general trust public agencies and, therefore, are inclined to do as they are told. However, there are only few reflections on the connection between these expressions of trust in authority and the argued overconfidence in authorities to manage other problems. Neither is there any in-depth reflection on the connections between trust, involvement, and social engagement. Perhaps it would be beneficial for officials to reflect on this relationship of trust and how to maintain it.

The two dominating views of citizens’ motivation are often intertwined, as illustrated by the following quote, where a security coordinator starts to express motivations to reduce one’s vulnerability and proceeds to argue about responsibilities as an independent and valuable citizen:

‘The goal [with the municipalities risk communication] is to make the citizens aware of the risks and dangers that may affect their everyday life, to make them conscious about the things they must make risk assessments of and have preparedness for, and to make them aware of both their responsibilities as citizens and the responsibilities of the municipalities. […] In this way a resilience is created in the population, so that official actors involved in crisis management can prioritize the most urgent issues and not focus resources on those who should be able to manage on their own.’

(security coordinator, technical support unit, city area).

Despite arguing for the importance of a stronger sense of responsibility for the common good, no actions to support communal belonging or organization for preparedness on a communal level are suggested. Some officials mention that citizens are eager to volunteer with resources in case of a crisis but that the municipality generally cannot utilize these resources. The arguments that officials used to describe citizens’ motives for climate risk-related preparedness and the frequency of these arguments are summarized in

Table 2. Municipal officials’ views on citizens’ motives to preparedness for climate-related extreme events (in bracket the number of respondents that stress this barrier).

Motive	Description of…
Reduce own’s vulnerability
Risk assessment (13)	With access to correct information about personal/local risk and vulnerability, preparedness will be rational.
Exposure (10)	Experience of focus event. A high proximity and exposure to risk.
Available measures to reduce risk/vulnerability (9)	Capital to reduce vulnerability and resources to prioritize risk preparedness. See plausible ways to affect the situation, preferably with small measures.
Affective factors (7)	Concern/worry for: 1. Property; 2. Family; 3. Oneself.
Invitation to take part (6)	To feel directly invited to act as part of the local society’s preparedness, e.g., by personal address.
Type of risk (5)	The risk is known, concrete, and within the near future, and the measures are accessible and in balance with possible impact.
Influence or group thinking (4)	Following social norms to act in certain ways. Behavioral change motivated by family members and friends. Influenced by social media or the press.
Being a responsible and solidaric citizen
Self-responsibility (14)	To recognize own responsibility according to the law and authorities’ recommendations. A will to take responsibility and support the system, or at least to do as one is told.
Solidarity (8)	Care for society and for those more in need of the welfare system. Feel part of the society. Altruism—want to step in when public resources are limited.

.

The municipality officials’ views of citizens’ motives and the two dominating views include a variety of complementary and sometimes conflicting arguments. The motives to some extent mirror the barriers; for example, experience is an asset, whereas a lack of experience is a hindrance. This reasoning limits what municipality officials can do in practice to motivate residents’ preparedness. The hope seems to be that a sense of responsibility for themselves, others, and society at large should lead to individual-level actions about home preparedness when the crisis strikes.

5. Conclusions

The officials’ understanding plays a crucial role in the effective implementation of governance measures. They serve as intermediaries between policy objectives and practical execution, interpreting guidelines and adapting them to local contexts. Their understanding of specific risk scenarios and the various actors involved enables officials to develop targeted strategies to address them. Additionally, officials’ understanding informs their communication efforts, ensuring that information about risks and preparedness measures is effectively disseminated to the public. The results of this interview study show that municipal officials view citizens as rather ill-prepared for climate change. They perceive that the main barriers are that citizens have a (naïve) belief that the municipality will solely take responsibility for its residents, that risks are of low priority (i.e., a weak risk perception), and that citizens lack resources. Therefore, the officials argue that there is a need to communicate the individual responsibility of household preparedness in case of a crisis.

The perceived motives are almost the opposite of the abovementioned barriers, namely that residents feel vulnerable (i.e., a strong risk perception) yet capable of acting and that they feel a responsibility as citizens to be prepared in accordance with legislation and authorities’ recommendations. However, apart from the household preparedness, the officials do not provide examples of how citizens’ collective sense of responsibility can be demonstrated or contextualized. Barriers seem to dominate the narrative and rationalize a limited role for citizens.

Regardless of whether the perceptions of citizens barriers and motives are true, officials’ meaning-making rationality—how they understand and interpret citizens—has important practical effects on local risk governance. Through this understanding, municipal officials develop strategies for increasing the municipal capacity to handle climate crises, including strategies for making citizens better prepared for climate crises. In their understanding of a situation, both the reason for a social problem and the solution to it are grounded in the rationale that makes their actions meaningful and justified. Whereas some of these perceived hinderances and motives are easier for the municipality to deal with, others are harder and concern more structural issues. Presumably, it is relatively easy to implement measures to increase the level of risk awareness and spread information about how citizens themselves are greatly responsible for handling issues related to extreme weather. To change their relations to the wider society, fundamental values, and public discourse, however, is considerably more difficult. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the emphasis is on individual responsibility and communication about it.

Even if municipal officials ask for better preparedness of citizens, at the same time, they have fostered a restricted view of the role of citizens. The municipal officials seem to have mainly adopted a technical risk framework where certain kinds of risks (such as floods, storms, and heatwaves) are identified, and technical measures can be used to deal with them. They argue that this approach is easier to communicate, but it is also within their professional expertise and municipal mandate. This framing of climate risks implies a limited role for citizens, and much of the municipal work is carried out through communication measures to make people not interfere with the municipal handling of climate risks or make demands on the municipality that will force it to suboptimize its work.

By exploring how municipal officials view the motives and barriers to citizen preparedness, the study can conclude that the meaning-making rationality of officials shapes their relationship with citizens as an experts–layperson one, and the role of citizens in local risk governance becomes unnecessary. This is one reason why the direct interaction between the studied municipal officials and citizens is limited in our study. The lack of interaction may function both as a catalyst and an intensifier for the municipality officials’ perception of the citizens. There is a paradoxical view on the relationship between the municipal officials and the citizens, namely that citizens should both follow expert instructions and act independently and proactively.

6. Discussion

Our study explores municipality officials’ perceptions of citizens’ preparedness for extreme weather events. The ways in which the professionals understand citizens and their role likely shape the organizing (e.g., design of networks formed and activated) and planning (which measures to increase climate preparedness) of climate preparedness. With residents’ home preparedness as a focal point, the current study shows that officials have limited trust in citizens as actors in climate-related risk preparedness. Municipal officials have excluded citizens from municipal planning and work with climate preparedness. Thus, it is not only important for municipalities to develop an understanding of how residents understand risk and crisis, but also to become better communicators, as other studies have shown [32]. It is also important to engage citizens as active partners in the risk management itself.

Whereas this study is explorative, and we do not intend to draw general conclusions based on this limited interview study, we still suggest three implications for municipal planning and local governance worthy of further discussion.

First, we acknowledge the importance of municipality officials’ meaning-making rationality. Climate threats are problems, embedded in an environment of complexity and uncertainty [33,34]. To make sense of them, organizations and people try to introduce order, where they selectively single out manageable moments from the formless mass of signals they receive [22]. For regulatory organizations and their professionals, this is an important yet often unintentional part of developing a contextual understanding of climate challenges. Depending on how they understand other actors’ different perceptions of risks, municipality officials develop what they perceive to be efficient and relevant ways of governing the situation. Based on our study, the perception of citizens as rather ill-prepared and naïve supports the rationale of sharing risk information but does not further explore participatory measures for risk governance.

Second, we acknowledge the consequences that meaning-making rationality has on municipal planning and local governance. Street-level bureaucrats interpret public policies, develop local plans, and implement strategies according to their understanding. As the Swedish national policies on climate crisis preparedness are vague, there is plenty of room for interpretations guided by municipal officials’ understanding of risk and other actors. The meaning-making stories presented in this study show that municipality officials assume that if people know the right thing to do, then they will do the right thing. This idea seems to give meaning and provide a sense of order for the municipality officials in this complex situation; it rationalizes a hierarchical relation between the expert’s knowledge and the layman’s thinking and motivates municipalities’ efforts to provide information about risks to facilitate change in risk perception. However, there is weak scientific support that public authorities’ information provision leads to a change in citizens’ understanding (in terms of awareness, coping, and preparedness) [27,35,36]. Instead, many studies have found that public involvement, in which citizens are made partners through dialogical and participatory approaches, is a more appropriate approach [37,38,39]. Obviously, public involvement and public consultation can lead to unwanted effects [40], have very restricted effects [41], or be used in a purely instrumental way to prevent criticism of processes and decisions [36,42]. These possible effects should not, however, overshadow that public involvement can have substantial positive effects and play an important role in making planning more socially robust [42,43].

Third, it is important to actively address the negative consequences that particular meaning-making activities may have on municipal planning. Relating to studies that have shown that Swedish municipalities have low levels of maturity regarding strategic visioning for climate neutrality [44], it is reasonable to assume that the currently dominating meaning-making rationale does not support proactive and forwards-thinking approaches to climate adaptation. Perceptions of uninterested and unwilling residents likely influence the level of ambition in the plans developed by the municipality. However, officials’ expressed views about citizens are not necessarily the only valid or correct views. Research on risk perception has shown that there are many factors affecting how citizens understand and act regarding risk (e.g., [30]). However, there is a risk that officials have simplistic understandings or even have misconceptions about the citizens whom they serve, as other studies of Swedish crisis management have found [45]. Based on our study, such perceptions of citizens also seem to exist at the local level. While there seems to be an improvement in alignment between the perception of individual responsibility and how citizens act on the national policy level [45], it appears that prejudices are not sufficiently challenged at the local level.

In the current regulatory framework for climate preparedness in Sweden, civil officials are key actors, and their understanding of the issue and the actors involved are crucial. Governing risks means not only finding measures to deal with technically defined risks but also includes how actors understand the risk and how they cope with it. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss which activities and measures are relevant to strengthen motives and remove or reduce barriers among citizens. However, it is important to emphasize that citizen involvement is likely to be of crucial value when facing extreme weather and other climate-related extreme events.