A major issue in current strategic planning is how local ambitions to achieve growth should be balanced against interlinked national and global targets for climate and environment. This competition between local and cross-boundary issues are of vital importance to highlight considering that all spatial planning is local in some regard.

The Swedish spatial planning system allows for a great deal of self-determination among the local municipalities. Research indicates that the municipalities first and foremost gives consideration to local environmental issues in regards to their strategic planning. This creates a potential conflict between local and non-local interests leading to a deprioritization of national planning interests.

Considering these issues the Swedish spatial planning system should be examined to identify its potential structual weaknesess. Towards this end the essay examines a case-study of expanding cross-border trade in the municipality of Strömstad using discourse analysis. Using this the essay maps how perspectives on cross-border trade among the participating actors has shaped the planning process. The esseay has a broad approach covering issues of politics, economics and environemnt to capture how these issues interlink and affect each other.

The essay reveals that the planning process has been characterized by an informal co-operation between the municipality and the corporate interests that stands to gain from the expanded border trade. Private companies that do not stand to gain from the municipal planning strategy are excluded from the informal process. The informally participating companies finance part of the planning process and are expected to finance the investments in infrastructure which will be required to realize the planning strategy. This indicates that the process of strategic spatial planning has taken on some characteristics of the processes in Swedish planning usually reserved for developing detailed development plans for specific projects.

The most commonly occuring perspective on the local cross-border trade is one of its use for the local area in generating growth and jobs. Issues of global environmental impact are portrayed to be of such wide consequence and affected to such a small relative degree by the strategic plan that it is not for the municipality to solve. The municipality portrays this conflict of local and national interests in its strategic plan but does not alter the proposition to lessen these. The county administration, participating to secure state interests, is initially sceptical of the proposition but relinquishes much of its criticisms despite no alteration of the proposed plan. Cross-border state actors in Norway are given little opportunity to participate in the planning process. The perspectives reveal a great risk that national sustainability policies are left unimplemented because of municipal self-interest.