The public sector in Sweden has charged its institutional structures with a new goal for societal development under the rubric "The Sustainable Sweden". This has been the result of international agreements that Sweden has entered into and domestic debates concerning the need for a sustainable development. The interaction between the public sector and the development of the energy system has entered a new phase. At the same time market reorientation has radically changed the public sector's possibilities to directly control the implementation of the sustainability goals in the energy system. Influence through ownership and the direct political control that this entailed has more or less been voluntarily phased out during recent years by governmental and municipal organizations. The desire for a change towards sustainable development has, however, meant that the public sector needs new ways to initiate, push for or support processes of change within the energy system in its new, multifaceted shape. Therefore in this study we focus on the energy sector and the possibilities to development steering methods for a sustainable energy system by: - Studying processes of change in different parts of the energy system with the purpose of identifying different forms for strategic change, - Describing the pressures, barriers and possibilities which are made visible in these processes, - Discussing and developing methods for managing and steering the processes of change.