Swedish Vision Zero policies for safety – A comparative policy content analysis

Kristianssen, Ann-Catrin; Andersson, Ragnar; Belin, Matts-Åke; Nilsén, Per · 2017 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2017.11.005

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Summary

This paper presents a comparative policy content analysis of Sweden’s "Vision Zero" policies across five safety domains: road traffic, fire, suicide, patient, and workplace safety. Adopted by the Swedish parliament in 1997 for road traffic, Vision Zero aims for zero deaths and serious injuries by shifting responsibility from individual user behavior to system design, based on the scientific principle of human tolerance to kinetic energy. The study investigates whether this policy innovation has been substantively transferred to other sectors or if it remains merely a rhetorical "buzzword." The authors employed a qualitative text analysis of official policy documents, including government bills, parliamentary decisions, and national strategies. They utilized a framework identifying four core policy components: decision (actor/level), problem (harm/cause/responsibility), goal (precision/measurability), and measures (hard/soft instruments). The analysis focused on nationally adopted policies in Sweden to control for political context, allowing for a detailed comparison of how each sector defines the problem, assigns responsibility, and selects measures. The results reveal significant variation in how Vision Zero is operationalized. The road traffic policy is the most coherent, explicitly framing the problem as kinetic energy exposure and assigning primary responsibility to system designers, supported by "hard" measures like infrastructure redesign (e.g., roundabouts). In contrast, other sectors show weaker alignment with the original Vision Zero philosophy. For instance, the fire safety policy retains a strong emphasis on individual responsibility and behavioral change, despite adopting the "zero deaths" goal. Similarly, the suicide policy focuses heavily on information campaigns and reducing access to lethal means, reflecting a mix of soft measures rather than systemic redesign. The study finds that while the terminology and ultimate goal of "zero fatalities" have been widely adopted, the underlying causal logic and the shift to system-design responsibility have not been consistently grounded in each policy area. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to the understanding of policy transfer and diffusion. It demonstrates that imitating the formulation of a successful policy is easier than transforming its core principles into workable tools for different contexts. The findings suggest that the cross-sectoral spread of Vision Zero often lacks the substantive theoretical grounding present in the original road traffic policy, potentially limiting its effectiveness in other areas. This highlights the complexity of transferring policy innovations across sectors, where motivational, contextual, and design factors influence whether a policy is merely copied in name or adapted in substance.

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• traffic safety culture