Public defence: Maja Flåto

This dissertation is about how knowledge, strategy, and governing are connected in today’s knowledge society. With homelessness policies in Norway as its theme and case study, the dissertation examines how the phenomenon of homelessness has been understood and developed in practices of research, policy, and governing between 1996, when the concept of homelessness was introduced, and the present. The experience of long-term homelessness in Norway, which generally has good welfare schemes and a solid safety net, affects people with challenges such as drug use, poverty, and mental illness, which are conceptualised in many disciplines and traditions. The concept of homelessness links the problem to the lack of housing and proffers housing as the solution. In Norwegian and international research, this problematization has been bolstered by the shift of focus from individual explanatory models to structural ones, such as the lack of accessible housing. 

The purpose of the study has been to explore how this particular understanding of homelessness arose and what causes it to be maintained. The empirical material is the result of interviews with, and observations of, employees in the sectors involved in public administration at the ministry and directorate levels, and includes texts that are either publicly available or the result of processes that took place during the project period. The material is analysed and discussed in light of theories of governing, with a focus on how knowledge, professions, and technologies are woven together with the design and implementation of plans and strategies. 

The dissertation consists of three papers. Paper 1 sheds light on how homelessness was constructed and constituted as an area for knowledge development, policy, and practice in the period 1996–2005. Persons without permanent dwellings were defined as homeless and mapped in line with the definition, while the survey became a knowledge base for arguments in political documents and the implementation of strategies and practices in the municipalities. This development is discussed by engaging theories of sociology of knowledge, with a focus on how the problematization of being without a home was reduced to dealing with the absence of a material housing unit. 

Paper 2 discusses how the sectors of public administration, particularly those involved in policy and practice development related to homelessness, understand and approach the problem of some people living without permanent homes. The sectors are organised around various themes and concepts related to work, drugs, crime, and housing, and they approach the theme of homelessness via knowledge developed within these subject areas. This shapes the understandings of problems and solutions differently. The empirical material is discussed in light of theories regarding the close links between government management and the measurement and knowledge obtained through predefined categories, showing how knowledge can thus become a barrier to the goal of achieving integrated approaches where several administrative sectors develop solutions together. 

Paper 3 presents a study of the current Norwegian national strategy Everyone Needs a Safe Home (2021–2024). I ask how this strategy of social housing policy constructs homelessness as an object of policy. Rather than including homelessness in the dominant discourse of disadvantage in the housing market, the strategy addresses homelessness within a discourse where health and welfare services are central. Homelessness thereby appears as an appendix of housing policies. However, the strategic initiatives to solve homelessness are typical of the neoliberal discourse that frames housing policy more generally, such as measuring results by knowledge in numbers. Hence, the strategy sets out initiatives for managing rather than solving homelessness. 

The overall conclusion of the project is that the discourse of homelessness knowledge and policy is limited and only loosely connected to the surrounding discursive fields. It is also a discourse that has not developed significantly since it was established in 2000. The discourse is reproduced through the ways in which the knowledge that informs policy and practice is mainly initiated by the government and gathered through pre-established categories. I argue that this is caused by the fact that homelessness is governed within a policy field embedded in rationalities of housing economics and the market. Here, the preferred knowledge (deemed valid and relevant) to inform policies is knowledge by numbers. 

However, the discourse of homelessness is loosely connected to the social housing policy discourse. While agency in the market is the norm, establishing agency in the market for the homeless person is not an evident policy objective within the homelessness discourse. Governing homelessness within marketized housing policies, therefore, seems like a paradox. The homeless population is precisely the one that does not partake in the housing market, as it lives at the margins of society, with experiences that are not captured by the pre-established categories of the language of economics. A sound policy to remedy the condition of being without a home would require knowledge to be obtained outside of the categories established so far in research and government—knowledge that could capture the situation of lives lived outside the normal.