The Swedish systems for water- and wildlife management involve a vertical and horizontal shift in authority: from the national level to the supranational and sub-national levels; and from public authorities to collaborative arenas composed of both public and private actors. The new systems have introduced new decision-making structures and institutionalized stakeholder involvement in public policy making. Thus, they provide good examples of both multi-level and adaptive governance systems. Since institutional design is a balancing act of considerations and trade-offs, the formation of these new governance systems might solve one problem while giving rise to others. Multi-level governance structures, with participatory elements, challenge the idea of a hierarchic and functional division of authority and have democratic implications. Multi-level designs are based on different principles and can, accordingly, be expected to respond differently to various governance quandaries (such as adaptability, effectiveness and legitimacy). While the systems for water- and wildlife management share similarities through stakeholder-involvement and implementation of a new multi-level governance structure, they also contain important differences as they are designed on different logics and in order to address and solve different types of problems. While the water governance design to a large extent is ecosystem-based and aims at achieving good water quality; the wildlife governance design builds on social representation through stakeholder involvement and aims to build legitimacy in a conflict-ridden policy area. However, when scrutinizing current government-governance typologies, we find that they are too broad to disentangle the defining features of different multi-level governance designs visible in contemporary environmental management; and that there is a knowledge gap regarding how these different institutional designs can be expected to affect governance outcome (i.e. adaptivity, effectiveness and legitimacy). The paper outlines an analytical framework to address these theoretical shortcomings through a comparative study of the Swedish systems for water- and wildlife management.
