The only game in town: NPM’s resilience and depoliticizing effects in (r)urban sustainability transition

This article explains the resilience of New Public Management (NPM) by conceptualizing it as a ‘mobile assemblage’ of flexible ideas and practices translated across contexts. Drawing on a qualitative study of four Swedish municipalities undergoing (r)urban sustainability transition, we demonstrate how NPM is mobilized as a set of flexible resources – managerial tools, entrepreneurial identities, market-making devices, legitimizing discursive resources, and behaviour-prescribing scripts – to organize transition initiatives. NPM thus becomes raw material for four governing arrangements – temporary projects, consultant collaboration, municipally owned companies, and public-private partnerships. Through these arrangements, NPM embeds market and management logics into local governance, fostering silent depoliticization.