The Swedish school law says that students who need special education should have all the support they need to reach the qualification that is set up. The arrangements have to be written down in an Individual education plan (IEP). Before the IEP is set up there has to be an investigation about what kind of support and measures the student needs to reach the qualification that is set up. The aim of this study is to examine student?s participation in school and in the progress with their own IEP.I have accomplished a qualitative study by interviewing eight students during the letter part in the nine-year school.

Studies show that older is an increased proportion patients in hospital and that it is a patient group that can be difficult to communicate with because of older patients' often multiple disease picture. Relatives to the patient can be help for caregivers in the communication and the care of the patient. The aim with the study was to examine relative's experience of participation, meeting/support, accessibility and information on a geriatrics rehabilitation care unit. The study had a descriptive design and was designed as a questionnaire study. It was implemented on one geriatrics rehabilitation care unit on the countryside in central Sweden, belong to Uppsala University hospital.

The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the places importance for young people with disabilities. The study?s central questions are what type of places they visit and what characterizes them. It is also about answering the questions why the places are visited and what meaning this has for participation and identity. The study´s central concept is room/place, participation and identity.

Local participation in nature conservation has gained more attention over the last decades due to international conventions as well as local and national initiatives. This development can be seen as a reaction to a more expert oriented nature conservation characterized by centralized control and strict preservation of so called "original" nature. The overall objective of this thesis is to contribute to research on new forms of conservation where democracy and local participation is included. The case study focuses on the process of producing a pre-study for a suggested national park in southern Jämtland in the Swedish mountain region, and aims to investigate to what extent local participation was included. The pre-study was led by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) and the County Administrative Board (CAB) in Jämtland.

The purpose of the study is that based on focus groups with personal assistants understand how self-determination and participation, expresses itself in work with the users. The study has a focus on the concepts of power and help and social citizenship in the context of self-determination and participation. We are interested to explore how personal assistants reason and argue about different design cases and situations related to self-determination and participation in the relationship with the users. For this study we have used a qualitative method and to collect our data we have used focus groups and different design cases (vignettes). To analyze our data we used the theory about power and help and the theory about social citizenship.

The aim of the study has been to gain an increased understanding of the sense of participation and influence that the enrolled nurses, working with home-help services within the purchaser ? provider model, feel and how this participation and influence affect them. Five enrolled nurses in three of Stockholm's districts related their experiences of participation and influence at work in the qualitative interviews that were conducted. The result was then analyzed with the help of two theories, Karasek's and Theorell´s Demand- Control Model and Antonovsky's theory regarding ?a Sense of Coherence (SOC)?.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union a lot of hope has been put on civil society to help develop Russia into a more democratic society. This study explores the constructive elements in the relationship between civil society and the state in Russia, and how this enables the work toward political development. By using Julie Fishers theory about political development and organisational autonomy I discuss the varying and often complex ways in which civil society and the state interacts. These are often not mentioned in the liberal tradition, which believes that civil society's most important democratic function is to act as a watchdog for the state.There is very limited political space for NGO's in authoritative Russia. The existing oppositional NGO's are important for the political development, but they are few and their impacts on society are limited.

The local politicians in Sweden are responsible for a great deal of the welfare system why one would assume that there are a lot of demands put on them - demands for certain skills or a certain level of competence. I have in this study tried to find out how the demands on the local representatives concerning the demands for competence and the actual level of competence among the politicians are affecting the local politics. This was done through investigating how the local politicians are perceiving their level of competence and the demands put on them, but also how the employees are perceiving the demands and the level of competence put on the politicians. The study was made in the municipality of Gislaved in Southern Sweden. I was using both quantitative method (an opinion poll among the politicians and employees in the municipality) and qualitative method (interviews with three politicians and three employees and literature studies).In order to investigate the demands for competence I split the concept into ?soft? competence (socially and emotionally based skills), and ?hard? competence (skills based on knowledge, education and experience).

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.

In 1998 a new regional development policy was introduced by the Swedish government. A central feature in the policy was the formation of partnerships at the regional level. The partnerships were meant to consist of local and regional stakeholders, representing a great variety of interests, who would collaborate in order to improve regional development. The new policy was promoted, besides being more efficient, as a way to broaden Political participation and to break male-dominated structures.This thesis discusses whether the regional partnership actually favours ?women's interests?, in terms of how the relationship of power between women and men is constituted by the model.

The purpose of this thesis is to expose the political myth in the West about the ageing population seen as a threat against the welfare society. To do so I have described what a political myth is, and showed how it is presented in the most influential newspapers and organisations in the West. I have also presented alternative perspectives to the dominating view on the ageing population and it's impacts on welfare. In this way I have tried to point out that the subject has a political dimension. In the thesis last section I compare the message presented in the newspapers and the organisations with the characteristics of a political myth.

Citizenship is fundamental for participation in a democracy. It gives us rights but also responsibilities in the state that we are citizens of. Citizenship provides us with the opportunity to vote in order to influence who should govern us. However, not all living in a state are citizens. Some individuals are not included in the political life of the state.In recent years, there has been a rise of nationalist political parties in Europe.

In this thesis I discuss about economical and political transition in countries that is consecutively being induced by influential external actors. Looking closer on the role of the EU as a dynamic transitional force, with the intention of examining to what extent the EU can pursuit its interest and modify the economical as well as the political structures of transition countries. With relations to four transition states on the Western Balkans, more precise Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia (FYROM), I have examined the influential position of the EU. Another feature that is discussed is the approach of the EU and the cause of it in respect to the Western Balkans. Since the end of the crises in Kosovo the EU was given the leading roll in stabilizing and reconstructing the Western Balkans.

Swedish law (SOL 2001:45, LVU 1990:52) has gone through several changes to promote participation. The law also includes that young people should be able to participate even during a placement at youth detentions.  The aim of this study is to describe how young people at youth detentions are participated in their treatment plans. The questions of the study were: How and where are the young opinions produced in their treatment plans; how did the opinions change during the time in detention; and how have the opinions been considered at youth detentions? Participation is a wide concept with different meanings. The meaning of participation in this study is that youth have been listened to and that their opinions have been paid attention to.

This is a sociological jurisprudence study which focuses on "child perspective" in Law of Support and Service with Certain Functional Impairments, LSS. The purpose of the study was to clarify the meaning of child perspective in LSS and analyze it in relation to practice. The study was conducted with mixed strategies combining qualitative and jurisprudential methods. Both LSS and Law of Social Welfare, SoL, were studied. Social workers from dirrerent muncipalities in Sweden were interwiewed.