The purpose of this essay is to investigate why the two Swedish municipalities of Frykerud and Östmark were the only municipalities in Värmland that were forcibly merged by the state during the ?Municipality block reform? of 1971, and whether local identities played a role in the resistance against this reform.     The study is designed as a comparative case study and builds on both history and political science to analyze the topic from a broader perspective. Based on the research situation three theoretical theses have been formulated, the durability of which will be tested in the analysis part of the essay.    The study notes that Frykeruds resistance against the ?Municipality block reform? started when the reform prevented a planned retirement home construction in the municipality. In the analytical part of the essay, the author discusses how the discontent can be interpreted as symptomatic of bourgeois centralization resistance, as well as being due to the fact that traditional, local self-government as a political subject was perceived as threatened.

This essay discusses in a comparative way the Swedish and Norwegian legal system, mainly laws that contain adoption regulations. It also compares the administrative work that the government in both countries practices in relation to the individual person. In this essay, focus lies on the legal rights of the child in the adoption process and how well the government and its service meet the requirements from abroad.This essay has shown that the government has many rules and regulations that regulate their work and that all the sub processes are designed to ensure the child?s best in the adoption in both Sweden and Norway. Despite some differences in the investigation process, the work is very much alike.

Ever since Lipsky wrote about street-level bureaucrats in 1980 the main belief has been that certain characteristics of their jobs make it exceptionally difficult to severely reduce their discretion. However, discretion comes at a price and if public servants abuse their power the legitimacy of government is at risk and ultimately even the democracy.This thesis address this question by analysing the Swedish employment service which in the beginning of 2001 started a project called ?Af Sverige? trying to improve internal rule of law. By comparing two local and fairly equal jobcentres and how the street-level bureaucrats within use their discretion, I seek to find support for my hypotheses that organizing local jobcentres according to the principles of machine bureaucracy plays a significant part in reducing discretion.My findings show that a jobcentre characterised by strict rules, few units, good communications and a forthright manager who delegates formal power to the employees results in a stricter and more uniform application of regulations among the street-level bureaucrats. My conclusion is therefore unambiguous.

This examination project is an investigation about the opinion and comprehension for political engagement of four young municipal politicians. The purpose with this project is to describe and understand the pronounced comprehension for political engagement. There is also an intention to investigate the educational in discussing political engagement with students in social studies at upper secondary school. The method that has been used is ?map of conceptions? because of its appropriate way to elucidate the comprehension and understanding of a certain subject. Those four young municipal politicians see political engagement as the will to improve the community. There is also an importance to have a large engagement in more areas than just one.

AbstractOur study deals with intrapreneurship in local activity. The main purpose of this study is to understand, explain and develop the concept of intrapreneurship in local activity with the help of existing information, our discussion, and reasoning and with the help of theoretical concepts. One reason for the choice of this topic was our pure curiosity towards this quite unique and unexplored phenomenon. We know that the term intrapreneurship in local activity has not existed longer than about ten years and the amount of existing thesis of intrapreneurship in local activity is very few. The information about intrapreneurship in local activity is mainly collected by studying Örebro´s intrapreneurship policies but also by studying other local authorities in Eksjö, Umeå and Västra-Götaland.

This essay aims to examine how safety is reflected in local plans. This was done by describing the physical environments, which are addressed in the local plans and its impact on safety. It has also been undertaken to see if certain physical environments with respect to safety have been addressed differently.The paper is made with the qualitative method Thematic analysis. The method is used to analyze the three local plans that have been available during the essay. The analysis was done with my created themes Traffic separation, Accessibility, High vision, Light and bright and Human presence.The results have shown that the local plans takes up physical environments that are good for safety.

The communication with government and municipality through Internet has in-creased during the last couple of years. Therefore we have chosen to focus our bachelor thesis in this particularly area and the needs for usable web services for the citizens. In this bachelor thesis we are studying a increasing group users, namely elderly citizens. During the study we have analysed E-governments ser-vices usability through usability tests. The combination of conversations and meetings with individuals, observations of interactions and literature studies give us the opportunity to explore the users needs.

This is an examination of how interdependence affects the behaviour of politicians and their ability to govern the way they want to. I analyze the memoirs of two Swedish prime ministers, Tage Erlander and Ingvar Carlsson to explore their experiences. I focus on how the increasing interdependence affects the politicians with regards to security, welfare, and financial policies. Sweden had a special position between Soviet and NATO during the cold war. This meant Sweden gave priority to it's neutrality policy during the cold war, compared to increased trade cooperation.

The present study discusses the political integration of immigrants in local government in the muncipality of Växjö from 1971 to 1991 in the form of representation. The main data source consists of lists of people holding local commissions of trust in the various boards and committés appointed by the municipality council, as well as in the council itself. These data are then compared to population statistics from Statistics Sweden. Main findings of the study are that immigrants are insufficiently represented in relation to their proportion of the population. It is suggested that this is a result of structural discrimination and possibly insufficient socialisation..

In Political Science a main theory is that a minimal winning coalition (MWC) will participate in the government. The parties included have to share the power of government. Therefore the winning coalition to be expected is the one including the fewest parties possible.My paper will atempt to examine if this is the main pattern in Swedish municipalities. My experience indicates that the ?Alliance for Sweden? including the four right-wing parties, that for the first time were connected through formal agreements in the elections 2006, formed a partly new and more obvious coalition pattern.

When new land use policies are made, opinions of stakeholders need to be taken in account, to avoid future conflicts. The motivations of commercial enterprises are often clear and easily communicated but due to inaccessibility and language barriers the indigenous people?s perspectives and needs are harder to reveal. This study therefore aims to identify species and sites of importance for the local people in Masihulan village on Seram Island, East Indonesia. This is a first step to facilitate better integration of local people´s needs into local government decision-making processes.Researchers at the Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR), with headquarter in Indonesia, have developed an approached called ?Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment? that aims to assess important natural resources for local communities in tropical countries.

The name of the study means ?The short arm - a study in diversity and arm?s length in the cultural collaboration model?. Right now there is a reform in the Swedish cultural administration where the responsibility for handing out state funds and grants to cultural organizations is changing from the state government to the local regional governments. The purpose of this study is to map the organisational changes caused by the reform and investigate how this affects the regional policies concerning cultural diversity and the arm?s length principle.

Studies in the recent years have showed that the preschool playground is important for both the physical and emotional development of children. The Botkyrka local government has decided to improve their preschool playgrounds in order to take advantage of these studies. The administration of childcare and education in Botkyrka is arranging a network between the different preschools where they work together to improve their outdoor environments. The network is arranging workshops and seminars where people from the different preschools can come and gain inspiration for improvements of their own preschools. The administration of properties has created a document where they describe the changes that are supposed to be made to the different outdoor environments. Through the administration of properties and the person who is responsible for the outdoor environments I was introduced to their work with the preschool playgrounds.

Local cultural environment planning in Sweden often comes to rely on municipal heritage plans. These plans are meant to facilitate management of local cultural values, work as a tool for local planning and increase awareness of cultural environments for the public. In the last decades public participation in planning has become more and more of the ideal strategy, challenging the idea of cultural environment planning as an expert-led field. The idea of the field as one that implicates public participation as a strategy has been fortified in Sweden through national goals, government bills and conventions. Nevertheless the implementation of public participation in municipal heritage plans remains quite uncharted. The aim of this study is to explore public participation in regards to how municipal heritage plans are developed and the perception of public participation in cultural environment planning amongst professionals, comparing bigger and smaller municipalities.

AbstractAt the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 the nations stated that traditional environmental policies were not sufficient to handle the multidimensional challenges posed by sustainable development. Governments needed to broaden their political decision making procedures in order to coordinate and integrate environmental, social and economic policies. Therefore a new tool was introduced in Agenda 21, National Strategies for Sustainable Development (NSDS). The aim of an NSDS would be to bring together actors from all parts of society to jointly reach a consensus on how to work towards the vision of a sustainable society. An NSDS would be seen as a strategic tool to help focus national policies for SD.