This article studies two Swedish organizations with key roles in the facilitation and promotion of ethics management vis-à-vis other public-sector organizations. The study offers insights into how organizations combine and prioritize ethics management measures, involve submanagement employees, and consider external stakeholders, in contexts of democratic governance and public concern about corruption. Our findings suggest that these types of bird’s-eye view organizations studied are important as they are in a position less prone to ad hoc scandal-driven responses. They can thus promote strategies that consider a combination of aspects and avoid a narrow rules-based focus.

Rekommendationer ifrån Folkhälsomyndigheten (Fohm) kom att spela en avgörande roll för pandemihanteringen i Sverige. Tidigare forskning har visat att medborgare med hög tillit till myndigheter är mer benägna att anpassa sitt beteende efter rekommendationer, på gott och ont. Kompetens och öppenhet kan leda till tillit. Syftet med denna artikel är att undersöka uppfattningar om Fohm:s agerande under hösten 2020 med särskilt fokus på några olika grupper i samhället. Generellt hade personer i Sverige hög tillit till att myndigheten agerat kompetent och öppet, men det finns skillnader mellan grupper. Undersökningen visar att unga vuxna generellt är mer skeptiska än äldre. Kvinnor, personer med hög generell tillit och personer som känner tillfredsställelse med det demokratiska systemets funktionssätt har högre tillit än män, personer med lägre generell tillit och personer som är missnöjda med demokratins funktionssätt. Tillit till myndigheter är nödvändig för att policyer ska fungera och myndigheter kan bistå politiska beslutsfattare med ovärderlig expertkunskap. Alltför hög tillit kan dock leda till att befolkningen får bristande förmåga att reda ut kriser och långtgående delegation till oberoende myndigheter kan också leda till problem med ansvarsutkrävande med bristande legitimitet för hela det politiska systemet som följd. 

The focus of this paper is to study how governments develop and use ethics management to uphold integrity and countervail ethics violations in the public sector, and how these strategies are adapted to a good governance setting, i.e. a setting with prosperous democratic governance and effective public administration. Even these settings have to deal with the continuing occurrence of ethics violations and there is also a perception among citizens that corrupt influence and other forms of ethics violations play an important (and sometimes increasing) role in public governance. We explore the role of ethics management and how it is promoted in practice in public sector organisations in Sweden, an example of a country characterised by the above. The purpose is to study two organisations with important roles for disseminating, promoting and coordinating ethics management in Swedish public administration, and what type of ethics practices/ instruments they promote. In state public administration, we study the Swedish Agency for Public Management (SAPM), which has a specific assignment from government to contribute to and coordinate state authorities’ work towards a sound administrative culture. In local government administration, we study the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR), a member organisation for all local and regional authorities with a similar role as SAPM as it comes to providing information, advise and education. These two cases enable the study of ethics management both in relation to state agencies and local government, which in Sweden have been more associated with ethics violations and scandal and is also more at arms-length from the central government concerning these issues. We ask what type of ethics management strategies they promote for state agencies and local government respectively. When doing so we look at how their strategies align on the compliance – values spectrum, to what extent strategies promoted include ethics practices that involve sub-management level employees, and to what extent and how the impact on ethics management of stakeholders outside organisations is considered.

Human rights groups frequently criticise FRONTEX and the legality of the agency’s operations has been questioned in scholarly literature. At the same time, recent studies have shown that humanitarian concerns are increasingly emphasised in FRONTEX’s rhetoric. Drawing on Manners’ concept of ‘Normative Power Europe’, and Niemann and de Wekker’s framework for empirical analysis of normative power Europe, this paper assesses FRONTEX’s cooperation with third countries with a focus on one norm: respect for fundamental rights. It examines to what extent the agency shows a genuine commitment to the implementation of fundamental rights and to what extent the agency is acting in a normative way, i.e. applying universal norms and showing willingness to listen to and learn from the experiences of third countries. The analysis suggests that that the agency has moved towards a more genuine commitment towards fundamental rights implementation and that there is a fair degree of inclusivity and reflexivity to third country cooperation. However, the possibility of internal conflicts of interest as well as discrepancies between what is stated on paper and what is happening on the ground may stand in the way of the agency’s exercising normative power.