Institutional work offers a promising lens for understanding institutional change, focusing on the efforts of actors in creating, maintaining or disrupting institutions. In this paper, we explore the capacity of a narrative approach to provide insights on institutional work, using a case study from the coast of Sweden. We identify four narratives that compete in the policy discourse regarding erosion and beach nourishment in the coastal province of Scania. The narratives reveal that actors hold different beliefs concerning the magnitude of the erosion problem, the division of responsibilities and the suitability of sand nourishment as a coastal protection measure. The narrative competition is considered reflective of past institutional discussions and ongoing institutional work in coastal management in Scania, confirming that narratives are used as sense-making and meaning-giving devices in institutional discussions.

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This paper discusses the dynamics of coastal policy change in Sweden, using erosion and beach nourishments as an example. The Multiple Stream Model is a theoretical model on agenda setting and policy change developed by the political scientist John Kingdon (1984, 2003). This paper applies Kingdon’s model in describing and explaining coastal policy dynamics regarding coastal erosion in Sweden. Coastal protection is not a separate policy field in Sweden: interventions to protect the (common) coast form a component of spatial planning,which is largely the responsibility of the municipalities. Our analysis reveals that interventions to protect the coast are indeed organized at a local level, by landowners and the municipality, driven by a strong problemperception. This problem perception is articulated as a local voice seeking increased acknowledgement of the coastal erosion issue by the national government. Although the problem of coastal erosion has entered severalregional and national policy agendas over the last decade, and the first implementation of a large scale beach nourishment has been experienced positively, this has not yet led to the opening of ‘policy windows’ for significantchange on the regional and national levels.@en