The Power of a Small Group: How Dynamic Interaction between Politicians and Activists Helped to Stop a Dam Construction in Sweden

Siting large infrastructure projects – such as hydro power plants – are often vulnerable to threats posed by societal pressure groups. These threats can be handled by decision-makers in various ways: by offering material benefits in exchange for activists’ cooperation and support or by supporting the struggle with a strategic hope that this increases the political support to decision-makers’ party in respect of other issues. This paper analyses various strategies the several Swedish political parties used for solving the conflict around a hydro power plant construction in northern Sweden at the times of instable national governments and widespread discussions about problems with nuclear energy and large dams in northern Sweden. The interaction, co-optation attempts, between the anti-power plant movement and political parties resulted with a rare situation in the Swedish political history where the parliament with only a slight majority run over the government’s proposal to construct the plant. This final vote was decided by one MP representing the incumbent party and the decision resulted with the 270 million krona compensation for the power company aiming to construct the plant. We examine which kinds of cost-benefit calculus motivated the use of various (co-option) strategies of the main political parties, and how this eventually led to a positive outcome for the activists. Similarly to increasing research on co-optation in authoritarian regimes and social movement outcomes, we suggest that one could achieve better understanding of the co-optation strategies by analyzing the capacities of the challenging groups and vulnerability of the governing actors.