Måns Jansson and Jacob Orrje have been awarded funding for new project The Administrative Life of Environmental Problems: Governing Material Flows in the Swedish Metal Industry 1750–1900 (2027–29) from the Swedish Research Council. The project builds on insights from our ongoing project, but focuses on new questions on the managing of environmental problems in Sweden's mining and metal industries 1750–1900.

Drawing perspectives from environmental history, histories of bureaucracy as knowledge, and economic history, it analyses how concerns about resource scarcity, landscape degradation, pollution, and health risks circulated between local worksites, regional supervisors, and the central bodies Bergskollegium, Vetenskapsakademien, and Jernkontoret. By studying how these institutions translated everyday observations into rules, standards, and visions of improvement, the project aims to understand how environmental problems were negotiated, codified, and made actionable across state administration, private stakeholders, and scientific communities during early industrialisation.

The research combines agile digitisation with qualitative analysis to explore a large corpus of handwritten minutes, correspondence, and reports. This mixed method enables both systematic detection of long‑term patterns and close reconstruction of debates and decisions. By reframing industrialisation as an administrative process rooted in environmental problem‑solving, the project offers new insights into the relationships between natural resources, technological change, and governance. It provides historically grounded perspectives relevant to current debates on sustainability and the green transition.