The evolution and future of environmental assessment research in Sweden

Strategic and project-based environmental assessments (EA) are critical instruments for integrating environmental considerations into planning and decision-making. Yet despite their importance, EA systems and research communities face a range of growing challenges.

In recent years, wide-ranging legislative reforms have begun to reshape the conditions for EA, including EIA and SEA practice. In Sweden, these reforms often emphasise procedural streamlining and acceleration—sometimes at the expense of public participation—and include proposals for a more centralised administrative structure. At the same time, the demands on EA professionals are increasing, with calls for highly skilled practitioners to manage and review increasingly sophisticated and complex assessments.

Meanwhile, both in Sweden and internationally, EA research communities are shrinking and becoming more fragmented. This trend risks deepening disciplinary silos, weakening the interdisciplinary collaboration necessary to address today’s complex sustainability challenges that EA is expected to contribute to solve. It also reduces access to EA-specific networks that connect research with policy and practice, limiting the relevance and impact of academic work.

Despite these trends, little is known about how current Swedish EA research contributes to policy and practice, which topics are most prominent, and how the research community is structured.

To address this, the project conducts a systematic literature review of Swedish EA research (EIA and SEA) published between 2015 and 2025. This period enables an up-to-date assessment of the field’s potential to inform ongoing reforms and builds on earlier reviews covering developments up to 2014.