The representative democracy has become weakened during the last decades. At the same time the United Nations declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992 that environmental problems can best be solved by involvement of all concerned citizens in decision-making. The main purpose of this study has been to examine if citizens panels is a possible way to involve citizens in environmental decision-making and what the outcomes can be. Furthermore the study has investigated what the participation has contributed to environmental politics and how representative the results have been. This has been carried out by investigating the Piteåpanel in the municipality of Piteå by conducting interviews.The result of the study shows that the involvement of the citizens in the decision-making influenced the environmental politics of the municipality.

The aim of this Bachelor´s thesis is to investigate how library statistics, performance measurement and indicators represent the modern public library activity. During the last decades the public library has gone through a lot of changes. Information overall has increased and new technology has been introduced into the library. This new development has had effects on the library users. The statistics reported to the Statens kulturråd (National Arts Council) has not changed in the same way.

This paper investigates the relation between stock performance and owner share retention in Swedish public equity listings during 2009 to 2013. The listings during the period are studied and divided into binary groups of "exits" and "non-exits", which are used in a statistical regression model to determine if there is a significant difference in average stock performance. The study finds that stocks of exit-companies on average significantly underperformed stocks of non-exit-companies during 2009 to 2013. Nevertheless, due to the limited number of observations available and the unusual market conditions, caution is required in interpreting these results..

The purpose of this study was to describe the school situation of adolescents who were subject to multisystemic therapy in Sweden, and also if a change could be measured after treatment. Factors that preceded the need for treament were also investigated. The sample consisted of 83 adolescents, boys (65 %) and girls (35 %), with an average age of 14 years. The method used was a secondary data analysis using pre-treatment- and post-treatment data collected from a 7-month follow-up conducted by Lunds Universitet. Results showed that the adolescents were low in school performance and high in truancy at pre-treatment.

This thesis examines the environmental benefits resulting from the choice of environmental certification scheme, with focus on energy. This was carried out by studying the measures that were implemented as a result of the certification of Sweco's three largest office buildings in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The office property in Stockholm has been certified with the Swedish Environmental Building, Gothenburg with the British BREEAM and Malmö with the U.S system LEED.The results from the study indicate that an environmental certification can reduce the energy consumption by up to 59 percent and the water consumption by 20 to 66 percent. However; the interviews, literature study and simulations in MATLAB indicate that the size and scope of these environmental benefits depend on several identified factors: the type of building and its conditions, system selection, grade level, the choice of indicators, the ambition of those involved and when in time the certification process begins. The comparison between Environmental Building, LEED and BREEAM showed that Environmental Building for the office property in Stockholm gave the largest environmental benefit in terms of reduced energy consumption thanks to several large measures.

The history of environmental reporting began in the early 1990?s when some companies included the environmental issue in their annual report. The increased interest of ethical and sustainable investments and demands from different stakeholders conjure a change of the report design. To develop the environmental reports and create design guidance for sustainability reports an organisation called Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was born. The GRI is environmental reporting taken to another level, a level that is according to sustainable development.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the institutional effectiveness of the environmental institutions Helcom and the Mediterranean regime, by using Haas, Levy and Keohane's "the three Cs"; governmental concern, contractual environment, political and administrative capacity. The method used is a comparative analysis.This study takes into consideration the specific structural and economic factors that are prevailing in each region where the environmental regime operates. This study also takes into account the influence of the European Union as a factor that affects the environmental progress.By focusing the study on the line of conduct concerning hazardous substances by respectively regime this study shows that the institutional effectiveness is fulfilled in neither Helcom nor the Mediterranean Regime, although Helcom has been more successful. The lack of state capacity is the most restraining factor for both developing countries and countries in the transition towards being developed, to achieve a good environmental status of the sea. This study also shows that the European Union sometimes has a greater impact on the environmental progress in states, rather than the environmental regime in countries that were/are aspiring members, thus showing the ineffectiveness of the regime..

The application of performance-based pay system among enterprises is becoming more frequent. Performance-based pay systems is used by organizations in hope of increasing productivity and have become more flexible. Employees may perceive the performance-based salary as a motivator or a threat depending on lifesituation and personality. At a perceived threat, the employee may become stressed. Work-related stress has become a serious social problem that can have consequences for both companies and individuals.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how small organisations within the subject field health and training work with their environmental scanning. The main questions in this thesis are: How do the organisations work with business intelligence/environmental scanning? What is their environment like and of which parts does it consist? How extensive is their work with business intelligence/ environmental scanning? Which are their main fields of application and how is the work compiled practically? In order to answer these questions we have chosen to use a qualitative method, which in our case consists of two interviews with people in managerial positions within the health and training subject field. The result of the two interviews is presented in a compilation, and it is thereafter discussed and analyzed. We used an existing theoretical model and altered it in order to correspond to the aim of this research..

We have performed a study much similar to Ritter?s (1991) about long-term aftermarket performance of IPOs on the Swedish market during the years 1990 to 2002. The study resulted in evidence for that Swedish IPO do underperforms their benchmark-portfolios during a 36-months period. Though, the grade of underperformance depends of the chosen benchmark. The study is mainly focused on a particular benchmark, a portfolio of non-issuing firms matched by size and sector.

The environmental debate is more intensive than ever before and the demands on companies increase. There are a number of methods to make it easier for the companies to fulfil the demands. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) end ecodesign are some of the methods that can be used. Syntronic AB has the possibility to reduce the products´ environmental impact in the design phase. Therefore it is important for the company to make it possible to visualize the negative environmental impacts a product can cause in an easy way. It is also important to visualize for there clients if any improvement is possible. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a simplified model.

To achieve peak performance as a young elite athlete, there are many psychological andphysical factors that have impact on human?s performance. Factors that affect theperformance interplay and interact must work to maintain ability to perform at its peak.The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that contribute to peak performance.Data collection method of the study has been done with a questionnaire, addressed toyoung elite athletes on a secondary school. It was 87 respondents who participated onvoluntary and anonymously conditions. The respondents consisted of men and womenbetween 16 and 19 years old.

The relationship between free trade and the environment is often considered conflicting and the debates surrounding it are infected. My thesis deal with this conflict and how environmental concerns are integrated in three regional free trade agreements, North American Free Trade Agreement, The common market of the southern cone (MERCOSUR) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). I point out how the organizations differ from each other in this respect and I present a possible explanation to why they differ. The explanation is founded on the theory of the environmental Kuznets curve and that environmental concerns will depend on which level of development the member states in the organizations have. To judge and rank the organizations I have composed a model based on a pre-existing description of the trade and environment conflict.

The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between three query strategies with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The thesis aims at examining how two types of noun phrases containing a modifier to the head word, which is a noun affect the retrieval performance with regard to recall and precision. The noun phrases in the thesis are of two types: 1) noun phrases containing a modifier to the head word (which is a noun) and which are not dictionary phrases (NF) and 2) dictionary phrases. Both types of noun phrases in this thesis contain at least two words. The queries were executed in Query Performance Analyser, QPA, containing the InQuery system and a sub collection of TREC-Uta documents with its topics.

A uniform environmental rating system for green buildings is demanded in today's society, where the requirements of the energy consumption for real estate are increasing. There are several different systems around the world used to rate buildings, all with different assessment criteria and starting points, which make it difficult to compare environmental rated buildings with each other.The purpose of this paper is to acquire knowledge about the differences between the Swedish environmental rating system Miljöklassad Byggnad and the American LEED, to discover which system is most advantageous. We also examine whether environmental rating affect the value of a property.Miljöklassad Byggnad is relatively simple structured, which makes it possible for private individuals to rate their property. LEED is better structured on the other hand in the case of environmental classification of commercial properties, because there are manuals for among others hospitals, schools and retail. The rating system for Miljöklassad Byggnad is good since the system seeks to fix the number of errors and deficiencies as soon as possible.