This chapter addresses the role of municipalities in Sweden’s decentralised and minimalist COVID-19 pandemic strategy. Building on a number of separate qualitative field studies, the chapter focuses management of schools, elderly care, reporting duties, and how the institutions of local democracy fared. All case studies indicate a frustration among local actors concerning the modes of information sharing between government levels, the slowness of the state bureaucracy when dealing with decentralised actors, and a general ambiguity concerning responsibilities. There was a focus on horizontal coordination of local crisis management and collaborative decision-making, where local autonomy was largely respected. Despite their autonomy, most local actors in all studied sectors based their strategies on the recommendations of the National Health Agency. In general, we found that the municipalities managed most of the local services and adopted the national minimalistic COVID-19 strategy based on open guidance mainly from the expert authority, the National Health Agency.