Solutions

In this concluding chapter, the point of departure is that political leaders must have the courage to make difficult and sometimes painful trade-off decisions when it comes to location of service facilities. The chapter discusses a number of identified challenges and offers some solutions and broad recommendations such as embracing the location challenge as a political issue; managing people’s expectations; ensuring a robust decision-making process through proper use of the administration; taking a long-term perspective into account; compensating for the inconveniences that location decisions may cause; maintaining an open yet critically evaluative attitude towards technical innovations and collaborative solutions; and designing public institutions capable of addressing the location challenge by establishing conditions for local democracy to function effectively. The chapter—and the book—ends by presenting suggestions for how the research field of location dilemmas can develop.