During the last decades, the public sector in Western democracies has undergone drastic changes. These changes have meant privatization and a more diverse service provision. Because of privatization, activities that were previously reserved for the public sector can now be conducted by the private sector. This has led to the traditional hierarchical model to be challenged by a new governing style throughmarket mechanisms, which was introduced during the 1980s. Both the hierarchical model and market model have since been supplemented by the network model that was introduced in the 1990s. The new organization has meant that steering is currently done in a complex environment with varying outcomes. In the foreground of the theoretical concepts that captures the development describedearlier is governance. The starting point of the governance perspective is that the traditional bureaucracy model for governing is challenged by new forms of organization and steering. In the early 1990s, it became possible, due to a change in legislation, to startindependent schools with public funding. This legislation change has had a major impact on the Swedish school system in terms of organization and steering issues. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the ideals of hierarchy, market andnetworking appear in the municipal steering of the local school system, and how these ideals affect the development and the intensity of the conflicts in the surveyed municipalities. The focus of the empirical study is three municipalities from the northern parts of Sweden, which are equal in terms of population, number of school pupils, the number of independent schools and with the samepolitical majority. The overall result of the thesis is that different governing ideals affect the levels of conflict in different ways. The municipality governed by marked ideals exhibit thehighest degree of conflict and the municipality governed by the network ideal exhibit lower levels of conflict. The municipality governed by the hierarchical ideal in the middle of the conflict scale.