The acts of promoting local business and implementing efforts to appear as an attractive location for potential business are rather new activities among Swedish municipalities. The knowledge about how these activities are organised and what strategies are perused are fairly limited. In addition the structures concerning cooperation between municipalities for economic policies contain incentives both for and against cooperation. This creates a complicated situation. Using prior research mainly done by Markus Gossas, Lennart J Lundqvist and an analytical model designed by Jon Pierre, which in this essay is completed with the works of Roger Henning, these issues are addressed.

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD; 2000/60/EC) was incorporated into the Swedish legislation in 2004 through the ordinance Förordningen om förvaltningenav kvaliteten på vattenmiljön (SFS 2004:660). The objective is that all water bodies shall reach a good status by the year 2015. In Sweden the comprehensive plans of the municipalities can play a large role in reaching these goals. A comprehensive plan deals with the long term water and land use of the municipality, which can facilitate an early consideration of water management in the planning process of the municipality. In Sweden five river basin districts have been established in accordance with the Water Framework Directive.

The aim of this study was to describe and to analyze needs and social efforts concerning unaccompanied/separated asylum-seeking children. The responsibility for the reception of this target group was transferred on July 1, 2006 from the Swedish Migration Board to the municipalities that sign an agreement with the Swedish Migration Board. Eight qualitative interviews were carried out with representatives for transit-residents and assigned municipalities in Skåne. Our main questions were: How has the reception of unaccompanied/separated asylum-seeking children been planned, how do the municipalities and the transit-residents consider their needs and what is the level of qualifications and competence within the municipalities in order to work with unaccompanied/separated asylum-seeking children on the basis of social efforts? We chose to clarify our findings on the basis of the attachment theory, which is applicable during the critical emancipation phase that the vast majority of the unaccompanied/separated asylum-seeking children find themselves in.

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.

To be able to maintain an adequate ITservice for various users and needs,more municipalities are looking at thepossibility for mergers of local ITdepartments. One solution for mergingmultiple services/functions and creatingsynergy opportunities is called SharedService Center (SSC). The concept of SSCis that the administrative serviceitself becomes a core activity withinthe organization. The aim of this thesisis to provide municipalities who areconsidering a merging of their local ITdepartments with recommendations on howto design the Shared IT Service Center.Recommendations are outlined based on ananalysis of IT-management literature,reports and by conducting a study onthree ongoing collaborations.The conclusions drawn from the studysuggest guidelines for the design of aShared IT Service Center formunicipalities. These are as following:Create a vision associated with aspecific and structured target state.Identify needs for different targetgroups in municipalities and set acommon standard.Create a clear and practical model/SLAappearance of the cooperation andagreement.Ensure the individual municipalitiescommissioning skills in order to notlose it in the context of a common IToperation.Find an organization that is democraticfor member municipalities andfacilitates long-term partnership.Specify the operation and maintenance sothat it can be regulated and controlledEstablish a common help desk.Establish a common standard andconsolidated infrastructure before theintroduction of a common technology platform..

The Swedish public procurement correspond to approximately 400 milliard Swedish crowns every year which corresponds to about a fourth of the Swedish Gross National Product. Setting proper demands in the procurement is a useful tool to drive the development towards more environmentally adapted products and provisions. The Act on Public Procurement (Lagen om offentlig upphandling, 1992:1528) gives the municipalities opportunities to consider environmental properties during the procurement. This combined literature and empirical study investigates the experiences made by the three municipalities Ludvika, Borlänge and Smedjebacken during the process of certifying their school kitchens as organic in cooperation with KRAV. The main conclusion is that without compassion and curiosity for developing a green public procurement changes can be hard to implement.

Discharge of inadequately treated waste water containing nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen as well as organic matter and bacteria is associated with a risk of eutrophication and contamination. The Swedish government has decided upon several Environmental Quality Objectives aiming to reduce the emissions of nutrients to water bodies.In Sweden, there are between 675 000 to 1 000 000 on-site sewage systems. Recent studies have shown that the function of small sewage treatment plants is in many cases insufficient. To prevent this regular service and supervision by a professional is needed. The focus of this study are small sewage treatment plants which use a technique where mechanical, chemical and/or biological reduction of pollutants is being used in the same facility to reduce nutrients in household wastewater.The aim of the study is to investigate how different municipalities ensure that small sewage treatment plants fulfill the requirements and reduce pollutants as efficient as the manufacturers claim.

In Sweden according to the planning and building Act municipalities have planning monopoly. The question about shopping centres in the outskirts of cities is a regional issue, because they attract customers from a large area. Municipalities often find it hard to assert themselves against large commercial companies when it comes to their establishing new retail outlets on the outskirts of cities. Without a regional co-operation there is a risk that municipalities can be played up against one another, so that more and more companies are given permits without the municipalities having taken the strategic consideration necessary for a long term sustainable development. The focus in this work is on four municipalities in the Södertörn region (Södertälje, Botkyrka, Huddinge and Nynäshamn).

An LSS officer?s activities are governed by laws and regulations and it has great power in influencing the individual's situation when reweaving its case. Officer?s actions have effects on the applicant and it can use its power and not look after the individual's best. Its interest can lie in community and his own position.

In recent years, several problems in the field of assistive device have been lifted. To manage the development Beslutsstöd (Decision support) has emerged as a systematic working method. Beslutsstöd is designed as a guideline and serves as a tool for physical therapists and occupational therapists in the prescription process of assistive devices. Beslutsstöd thereby aims to improve the quality and effectiveness of the prescribing process of assistive device in the organization of the municipalities. An implementation evaluation about how the implementation of Beslutsstöd in the municipalities did proceed has not been done.

This study was made in collaboration between Umeå University and Västerbotten sportsfederation. The study was aimed to find out how the municipalities are working with variousissues in the sports field. A subject of interest for this study was to see if the municipalitieswere implementing strategies in the sports field on determined goals by using policydocuments. Our study focused mostly on kids and youth that participate in organized sports inVästerbotten. Other aspects of interest in the study were economics in sports, how youthsports should be organized, and segregation in sports due to financial factors.

The purpose of this study is to get an understanding about how municipalities in Sweden integrate climate-change into the social planning; especially the risk of flooding. To get a good picture of the planning process, background about the following are given; flooding, social planning and protective measures that can be taken against flooding. Three municipalities in the south of Sweden is studied; Halmstad, Vellinge and Kristianstad. They have in their work progressed differently and Kristianstad is the municipality that already has taken measures to protect themselves against flooding. The other two have only started to plan for the future threat.

In November 2010, The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting) distributed a survey where 53 % of the responding municipalities declared that they use Twitter. Out of the municipalities that declared they did not use social media, 49 % answered that they were planning on using it but that they had not gotten started. The purpose with social media was primarily declared to be maintaining dialogue with citizens and a channel for information.The informal ?twittersphere? is a new environment for the conventionally formal government communication, and with it comes an entirely new set of demands on the style and content of texts, compared to other media. The purpose of my work was to present a style proposal for the public sector?s communication on Twitter, with the help of theory and empirical data.My methods consisted of text analysis and qualitative interviews.

This study was commissioned by the Västerbotten sports federation, whocalled for an overview of the policies that the municipalities inVästerbotten work after in the field of sport. The study aimed to identifysports policy programs or documents that have been produced by themunicipalities, and how they work with them. Furthermore, the studyhighlights the municipality?s politicians reasoning aboutsport andrecreation-sector,and how their sport policy-work was practiced. The datacollection was based on seven interviews and document-collections fromthe 15 municipalities.

The purpose of this essay has been to answer the question of whether or not administrators of economic support perceive that their professional status is ranked lower than that of their coworkers in other fields of the social services. We set out to study whether or not their comparative status differed depending on their use of standardized assessment instruments and if their experience with regards to professional status differed depending on the size of the municipality they worked in. We also wanted to determine in what way (if any) the comparative status manifests itself and what factors influences it.We?ve utilized method triangulation in order to answer the questions posed in our purpose. The quantitative study was conducted using a questionnaire and the qualitative with three interviews.