The overall aim of this paper is to explore and theorize on local school governance. In Sweden, as in many other decentralized school systems, extensive responsibility and autonomy has been delegated to Local Educational Authorities (LEA) concerning school management; as well as attaining and securing educational quality. However, ages of declining student achievement and deficient equality between schools have spurred extensive criticism against the Swedish school system. This criticism has resulted in a recentralisation trend, where the state has successively taken a stronger control over schools' outcomes  in terms of, for example, an establishment of a Swedish School Inspectorate in 2008 with the aim to strengthen the national audit and monitoring of schools; ii) a reformation of the Education Act in 2010, emphasizing local authorities’ responsibility for educational quality, student achievement, and equality; iii) the initiation of a number of national professional development programs; and iv) a national curriculum with strengthened national knowledge standards, assessment criteria, and a predefined knowledge corpus. Considering such a ‘re-centralization’ movement, new conditions between the state, the LEA and the schools has emerged (Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017a; Adolfsson, 2018). In the light of such a changing governing landscape, questions linked to local school governance can be raised concerning how the LEA navigate and handle the tension between strengthened state regulation and LEA’s responsibility for educational quality. Based on results from two research projects, conducted in two large-sized Swedish municipalities, the following research question is guiding this paper:

 In the light of an emerging re-centralization movement in Sweden, what governing strategies and actions do the LEAs apply to control and manage the schools with aim to attaining and securing educational quality?

Considering a ‘classical’ perspective of school governance (Lindesjö & Lundgren, 2014) four aspects of governance is often mentioned: regulation, economy, ideology (content) and evaluation. This paper offer a complementary perspective on school governance. In this paper, school governance are understood and studied in light of an organizational and neo-institutional theoretical framework (Orton &Weick, 1990; Scott, 2008). The school system is considered as a coupled system composing of different subsystems. From that perspective, school governance is understood as an effort to strengthen the couplings between these different subsystems (e.g. the national curriculum and the teaching practice) to attain a more coherent school system. In light of such coupling aspirations, three dimensions can be highlighted regarding how institutions try to control and affect other institutions, respond to external pressure, and seek legitimacy: regulative (rules and sanctions), normative (prevalent norms, expectations and ideals), and cognitive-cultural/discursive (shared conceptions and frames of sense-making) (Scott, 2008). These theoretical concepts enable to explore and distinghuish the character of different strategies and actions that LEA undertake concerning the local governance of the schools.

Empirical data from two research projects have been used to answer the research question (Adolfsson & Alvunger, 2020; Håkansson & Adolfsson, 2021). These two projects had a common interest in the dynamic interplay between the LEA and the local schools in two Swedish municipalities, in light of a changed national school governance. The process of analyzing the empirical material was conducted in two steps. In the first step, the transcribed material was analyzed exploratively. 18 semi-structured individual interviews of LEA representants were analyzed together with local policy documents concerning organization, policy and vision, leading and management structure, school improvement strategies. The aim was to attain an understanding of the LEA’s quality assurance systems in the two municipalities concerning organizational routines, strategies, and actions.In addition data from eight focus group interviews with principals (n= 23) were analyzed with aim to understand how principals made sense of a responded to these strategies and actions. In the next step, these empirical findings were analyzed in light of the study’s theoretical framework, i.e., in terms of tightly and loosely coupled systems and dimesions of school governance.

Based on the results It seems that local authorities’ space for regulative sanctions and control has been weakened. In order to compensate, local authorities apply strategies of soft governance for controlling the schools. These strategies are characterized by normative and cognitive/discursive dimension and conducted within the context of the LEA’s quality assurance systems. The following strategies can be distinguished as especially important: - Local school governance through “Data-based decision making” - Local governance through quality dialogues - Local governance through professional learning and best practice - Obligatory educational programs for principals and system actors concerning leadership and data-based school improvement - Principal recruitment Finally, I’ll argue that ‘quality management’ should be seen as a fifth dimension of school governance.

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