From a 'Liberal' to a 'Social democratic' welfare state: the translation of the English Compact into a Swedish context

England was one of the first countries to install a Compact to regulate the relationship between state and civil society and since then several other countries have followed and initiated national Agreements, Charters or Concordats. Despite a growing academic interest into such national Compact models we have insufficient knowledge of how such ideas ‘from abroad’ are adapted and molded to fit with ‘domestic’ legacies, institutions and power disparities. The purpose of this article is to analyze the translation of the English Compact into a Swedish context and above all how domestic Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) acted to adjust such an international model to a national context. The article draws upon studies of written documents and interviews with key actors (politicians and CSO representatives) and two main conclusions are being presented. First, the article demonstrates that CSOs played an important role as translation agents as they identified the Compact idea long before key decision makers did, yet that the complete translation of the Compact model into a Swedish context was dependent upon the political will and ownership of central decision-makers. Second, the article demonstrates that the translation process was not as ordered as sometimes depicted within the translation literature and instead chains of translation processes was detected. These findings address a need to open up the translation perspective for the analysis of multiple types of translation agents and to understand translation as a nested process, in which one translation process might very well be interrelated with other parallel translation processes.