Since the 90s there have been extensive changes in the public sector, such as rationalization and increasing demands for documentation and review. The changes have also affected the social services’ victim support work that has increasingly been subject to various forms of regulation, such as requirements for monitoring, evaluation and quality assurance. This article aims to examine one of the monitoring systems applied in the victim support work: the instrument of open comparisons. This article is based on an exploratory study of the local organization of crime prevention in two municipalities and analyses how the processes of open comparisons are organized at local, regional and central levels. The empirical data consists of documents such as legal sources and handbooks from eg the National Board of Health and Welfare and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, as well as documents obtained locally in the two municipalities. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with professionals working on different organizational levels.

Analytically the study has been inspired by programme theory, which made it possible to concentrate on clarifying the operational idea in which open comparisons are based and capturing the consequences in the two cases.