Within process or manufacturing industries, the production of goods and services or the products themselves may have negative side effects such as pollution. An important task for environmental policy is to control and limit these pollutions, for example via regulatory measures. Although, the efficiency of such measures vary greatly between different industries and an increasingly important task for environmental policy is then to encourage companies to engage in environmentally motivated innovation. Governments can utilize other measures than regulation to indirectly decrease pollution. This thesis aims to analyze such activities and how it affects the innovativeness of wastewater treatment, refrigeration and automobile manufacturing industries.

Today there is a keen competition between regions in the world for companies and inhabitants in order to improve regional development and economic growth. In many regions there is an active effort to create a good home base for companies and inhabitants. Since 2003 municipalities in nine counties in Sweden have come together in co-operative agencies in order to work towards more efficient regional development.This essay focuses on the relation between the state and the co-operative agencies in the regional development policy and which possibilities the state gives the co-operative agencies to pursue an efficient regional development policy, both legally and financially. I have researched and analysed this through models and ideas on how the state governs the administration and through the translation theory. The result of my study is that the co-operative agencies have a relatively large amount of freedom to make there own priorities, but the ability to act efficiently within regional development is limited..

This bachelor essay studies families that have migrated from countries in Europe to Sweden,and their experiences of adapting to new conditions of the Swedish welfare state. Theirexperiences are studied firstly from an institutional point of view, which refers to the family?s experience of adapting family life to Swedish family social policy. Secondly it focuses how the families experience new norms and values connected to Swedish family social policy. The main aim is to seek what problems families migrating to Sweden might be confronted with when adapting to new conditions of the welfare state.

This thesis explores how the concept of ?legal corruption? manifests itself within the European Investment Bank with a modern approach to the theoretical understanding of anticorruption efforts. This approach conceptualises the idea of complementing theories based on contextual applicability rather than focusing on their competing qualities. The European Investment Bank (EIB), as the world?s largest multilateral lender, is an underexplored yet vital organ of the European Union, which has recently faced criticism for its alleged lack of transparency and dubious application of policy.

This study in political science examines the UN adopted resolution 1970 (2011) andresolution 1973 (2011) on the basis of foreign policy decision-making. The study aims toexplain how the UN principle of Responsibility to Protect came to be legitimized for the firsttime by the UN Security Council in the Libya conflict in 2011. By a poliheuristic perspectivethe study attempt to explain Russia and China?s acting in the voting of resolution 1970 andresolution 1973. The background to the conflict in Libya 2011 is presented in the study aswell as the Security Council?s actions during the conflict, from the beginning of the conflictuntil the adoption of resolution 1973.

The purpose of this essay was to study the implementation of a policy document, which concerns questions of integration, in a municipality with an indirect government. I have especially focused on issues regarding how civil servants describe the usage of a specific policy document and to what extent their autonomy and the indirect government have had an impact on implementation, and to what extent signals from surrounding institutions have had an impact on the creation of the policy document. The study was based on qualitative interviews in groups, pairs and with single individuals with twenty-seven civil servants and politicians working with issues concerning the specific policy document.One of the conclusions of my study is that the reason for producing the document in the first place is that the municipality as an organization strives to acquire a sense of legitimacy. The intentions of the document have only partly been implemented by the civil servants and politicians, since the document is not used in their daily work. Here, their autonomy has played an important part, as the choice to not use the document is the servants' own.

ABSTRACTThis thesis focuses on the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 and its impact on the Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Denmark. Starting from Walter Carlsnaes theory of energy vulnerability, the concepts of vulnerability and national security are tested on the selected cases and an array of policy alternatives are assessed. Posited available options like oil stockpiling, conservation, renewable energy and international coordination are evaluated as means for ameliorating the vulnerability of the nations. The theory chosen is further expounded with a consensus element to reinforce its explanatory power. The thesis utilizes a wide range of material from parliamentary records to daily newspapers in an attempt to shed some light on the interplay between economics and politics.Sweden and Denmark evince diverging developments despite their common starting point with exceptionally high oil dependencies and can be located on different ends of the energy policy gamut.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the level of the uniform way of interpretation from the Swedish asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Board, of asylum investigations for asylum seekers who claim sexual orientation as reason of refuge. The interviews with the officers were analyzed in relation to the policy document with investigation- guidelines and methodology.The results of the study showed that there was a uniform way to conduct asylum investigations and interpret the policy document, this despite that the document was found to be ambiguous in certain aspects. The uniform interpretation of the asylum officers was explained by the knowledge and understanding that exists within institutional organizations. This because the asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Board might have similar experience, knowledge and also the demands related to asylum investigations.The uniform interpretation demonstrated a strong similar common understanding of investigative work within the agency. This suggests a certainty that the investigations are carried out in a similar way regardless of which asylum officer within the institution conducting the investigation which indicates a well-functioning ?rule of law? for the asylum seekers. .

In the growing concern for the state of the environment more tools are being integrated in the decision-making processes. Sweden actively makes use of environmental impact assessment (EIA), which is supposed to minimise negative impacts of a project, policy or plans on the environment. The EIA process in Sweden still requires certain improvements to be more efficient. In this study actor interaction was analysed with trust being the framework for analysis. The aim is to find out whether it is possible to use trust as a framework for analysis since trust research is very discipline dependent.

This thesis aims at analysing conflicts between different ideals of democracy, using the example of a newly implemented citizen´s initiative reform. This reform gives citizens the right to make policy proposals to Swedish municipal councils. The proposals are to be handled in the same way as proposals from the municipal council members. An ideology analysis of various government documents as well as of an official state study (SOU) is carried out to identify and discuss the ideals of democracy that underpin the reform. The analysis is based on participatory democracy and electoral democracy theory and Arnstein's Eight Rungs on the Ladder of Citizen Participation is used to discuss different types of participation by the citizens.

Climate change and the sea level rise that it contributes to is an ever more pressing issue for costal municipalities around the world. Today there is a great deal of scientific reports and projections on what these changes could entail. However, resent studies on south Swedish costal municipalities have shown great discrepancies when it comes to how these scientific projections are implemented in the municipal planning and adaptation strategies. In an effort to understand the underlying reasons for this lack of concurrence, this paper has applied Rolf Lidskogs theory of the hetrogenity of science. The theory gives an explanation to the complications in the science-policy interface, by describing complicating factors in the communication between these actors.

AbstractThe thesis investigates how the European Union promotes stability and security in the Mediterranean region. The aim is to analyse the European Union?s security ambitions with Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Barcelona Process. An analytical framework with five sectors (military, political, economic, environmental and societal), based on the Copenhagen School?s theories about security sectors and securitization, is used for the analysis.

The purpose of this study is to describe children?s life issues. What kind ofquestions they have aboutlife, their thoughts about life. Another purpose of this study is to see the differences in how children?s thoughts about life have changed through the years.

AbstractDoes Geography Matter? A Study of the Bologna Process from a Policy Transfer Perspective.Essay in Political Science (D-level) at Karlstad?s University by Beatrice Högå, Spring 2007Tutor: Susan MartonThe purpose of this essay is to generally see how theories of policy transfer can help us to better understand the process through which the Bologna Process is being spread throughout Europe, and to specially see if geographic placement, i.e. in the heart of Europe, plays a role in how well and how fast the Bologna Process is implemented.To be able to answer the purpose, I have used Evans and Davies theoretical model on policy transfer network to describe the Bologna Process. Furthermore, Sweden and France are the countries being examined when they differ on the independent variable. From there, I have applied an analytical tool, namely process tracing, to examine whether there are differences in the two countries? work with the implementation of the Bologna Process.I have designed six specific research questions:Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to implement the two-cycle system?Have France performed this work earlier?Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to recognize awards and periods of study?Have France performed this work earlier?Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to quality assurance?Have France performed this work earlier?After applying the analytical tool to be able to answers these research questions, the answer to the general question Does geographic placement, i.e.

This essay deals with Swedish unemployment politics during the period 1918-1932, and can be seen as a contribution to earlier research of how the policies, established by the State Unemployment Commission, was carried out at a local level. This study bears upon  Uddevalla municipality, a town in the southwestern part of Sweden, which had about 13,700 inhabitants in 1920.The research was conducted in Uddevalla municipality archives, and the sources used are above all municipal records and documents from the local unemployment committee. The measures taken by the local committee to reduce the effects of unemployment have then been compared with the directives of the State Unemployment Commission.The survey shows that the local unemployment committee, at least during the first half of the 1920s, was very keen to follow the directives of the State Unemployment Commission, and they also tried to charge the municipality's economy as little as possible. The local policy was often even more restrictive than the demands from the State Unemployment Commission. During a few years in the middle of the 1920s, when the unemployment was relatively low, most of the unemployed did not recieve any help at all.The restrictive policy, however, led to an increasing distress among the unemployed, and the poor relief had to give financial help to a lot of unemployed and their families.