During the last decades the Swedish local party systems have gone through some considerable changes. The number of parties present in local party systems have increased and in some cases even doubled. This makes coalition building between parties complex and parties will be forced to rethink their coalition strategies and adjust to the new circumstances. Theoretically, coalition building has often been considered and applied to national data and there have been just a few attempts to develop and theoretically explain coalitions on a local level. Thus the aim of this paper is to use different theoretical approaches to local data to test the significance of traditional coalition theories.

Abstract A phenomenon that has been noticed more and more in media and the public space in recent years is what is called guerrilla gardening. It means the illicit cultivation of someone else?s land. This report's intention is to analyze what impact guerrilla gardening could have on today's urban space in terms of stable changes in norms and physical design. I have also focused on guerrilla gardener?s choice to carry out these actions illegally, without asking for permission, and what impact that could have on the issue of appropriating public space.

This study aims mainly to investigate what kind of role the public library plays in the regional and local development. The aim is also to investigate how the public library can strengthen the role as a factor of regional and local development. To explore the subject, the study is focused on the Swedish region of Västra Götaland. Three officials along with two policy documents, are included in the study as representatives of the region. Four public library managers are also interviewed but as representatives of the local perspective.

In our everyday life we are faced with many choices that have consequences on the environment. One of these is the food we choose to eat since food production has a big impact on the environment. In organic production the aim is to have a natural production process, where environmental impacts are minimized. By choosing organic food it is therefore possible to contribute to a better environment. A large number of meals are served every day in the public sector, which makes it an important player in the consumer sector that could make a major difference for the environment..

A decade ago the organic egg production in Sweden was nearly nonexistent (Föreningen för ekologisk fjäderfäproduktion, 2008). A rising demand for these products in the beginning of year 2000 made the organic egg production the most increasing production of all organic provisions. The Swedish consumers value provision production that have a reduced impact on the environment and further protects the wellness of animals and plants (Jordbruksverket, 2010). Today, the organic egg production composes roughly 6 % of the total egg production in Sweden. This indicates that the ambition of Jordbruksverket, which has an organic egg production goal of 10 % of the total production, is not yet achieved.The consumer demand on the market is the driving force for these new products, and the higher prices contribute to an essential portion of the additional costs of organic egg production (Jordbruksverket, 2004).

This report is about logistic efficiency in companies without own production. The authors have interviewed employees working at two companies, Telias store in Skärholmen and Orion Diagnostica AB. The purpose of the report is to find out which logistic functions the two companies are using to create efficiency.Today?s markets are more global. Different parts of a product can be made in different parts of the world.

Lean is a production philosophy which is about increased resource use while meeting customer requirements. The foundation of lean comes from Toyota and their production philosophy The Toyota Way. Professor Jeffrey k. Liker has worked with Toyota's production philosophy and Lean for a long time and has created a 4 P model and 14 principles that characterize the Toyota production system (TPS), which many sources refer to.The aim of my work is to study the working procedure of asphalt projects from sales to the laid asphalt with a focus on planning and production management. The goal is to examine how the lean philosophy can be applied in planning and production to simplify the flow of asphalt projects based on Likers model and principles.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The means to political participation at the local level in Sweden are changing and this change is analyzed through a case study. The first aim is to explore the forms of public political participation in Swedish municipal Älvkarleby, namely public question time in local government, citizen motions and open meetings. A part of this is also to analyze he every day contact between citizens and representatives. The second aim concerns the reasons why politicians decide to support these means to participationThe empirical material consists mainly of semi structured interviews with local politicians, civil servants, participating citizens and local press. Official documents such as public minutes are also used in the process of creating an image of local participation.Local political participation is found to be limited but yet having the potential to strengthen democracy, provided that public decision-makers are open to a dialogue with the participants.Using Kjell Arne Røvik's theories of organisational change, the changes in local democracy can be explained as being partly rational, partly symbolic and partly identity shaping political decisions..

In the light of the problems the media industry are struggling with, local news reporting is only one of the challenges the news organizations are facing. When local editors is being moved to the cities the tie with the local community is being severed.The aim of this study has been to analyze how the inhabitants of Vilhelmina municipality talks about their experiences of local journalism. With methodological inspiration from the Critical discourse analysis (CDA) this study examined the discourses of local journalism, social media, journalism's role and municipal policy. The theorectical framework consisted theories of media and democracy, convergence culture and discourse theory.The survey was conducted with four focus groups interviews. The focus groups were divided in different cathegories based on the participants experiences, ages and employment.

Like many small-time companies there is a need to improve the flow of materials at HSP-Gripen AB. The company develops and manufactures hydraulic-powered grapples for the machine- and forest industry. By mapping the material flow in the current production and gathering necessary data, suggestions on how different parts of the production could be controlled is presented in this dissertation. This has been achieved by the study of relevant scientific literature. The suggested ways of controlling the production consist of 2-bin systems, hybrid material flow system as well as a cyclic product-planning.

Biogas is an expanding sector within the broad field of agriculture and animal production. Small-scale biogas offers local combined power and heating production and the substrate is transformed into high-quality biological fertilizer. This bachelor thesis focuses on a pig farm in south-western Sweden, where biogas is produced from pig manure, evaluates and suggests ways of optimizing the process and investigates whether investing in an upgrading plant would be a feasible and more cost-efficient option. The results show that the biogas plant is working well, although the production differs from the original plans. This shows in turn that planning and examining the basic conditions before making the investment is of great importance, as well as monitoring and keeping detailed statistics of the running process.

With a shifting world market and periodically profitability issues, Swedish farmers seekalternative ways to enhance their profitability. One interesting alternative to get a highervalue and enhance products is biodiesel, a way to improve the profitability on a farmscale.The diesel that is produced and sold, already have a mixture of 5% biodiesel, andthere is a possibility to add more biodiesel to it. By developing new engines severalengine-manufacturers now allow a mixture up to 100% biodiesel in their engines. Hencethere is a market for an increased production of biodiesel. The aim of this study were toinvestigate the possibilities and the problems related to farm-scale production ofbiodiesel, and to study the profit margin in the production.

Nuclear power production carries potential risks both for the environment and for the work force. Different safety measures are employed and they stem from local rules as well as from regulatory authorities. This work describes the development of a safety promoting tool at Forsmark Power Plant, one of Sweden?s three Nuclear power plants. We describe the development of a computer based system for Pre-Job Briefing and Post-Job Debriefing.

The main purposes of this study were to 1) quantify bacterial production in winter during ice conditions, and 2) to compare these production measures with values measured from summer and open water conditions in three humic lakes situated in northern Sweden. Another purpose of this study was to 3) examine whether clear-cutting significantly affected bacterial production or water chemistry in two lakes situated in catchments were a large part of the forest had been removed through logging compared to an undisturbed reference lake. In winter (March/April 2014), the bacterial production ranged from 0, 7 - 2, 2 µgC/L/day and in the summer of 2013 the production values was 4 ? 10 times higher. The main reason for lower bacterial production in winter was ascribed to lower water temperatures as well as to older and more recalcitrant DOC, as there were no significant differences in total dissolved nitrogen or DOC concentration or -quality, that could explain a lower production compared to summer.