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Not Available ; Credit is considered as one of the most important and basic input in agricultural production process. The prime source of agricultural credit in India has drastically shifted from non-institutional (money lenders) to institutional source in the last five decades due to various policy initiatives of Government of India. Grass root level analysis of the dynamic helps in further policy framework. Hence in this study based on district wise average outstanding agricultural credit by scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) for the TE ending 2017-18, three districts from each state indicating high, medium and low exposure categories is selected using clustering technique. For these study districts outstanding agricultural credit by SCBs was extracted (1976-2017) and analysed. From the Bai-Perron test years viz., 1983, 1990, 1997, 2004 and 2011 are identified to be most common structural breaks in the time series data of each district owing to various policy reforms in the field of agricultural finance. Based on these breaks the time series further subdivided into six phases viz., phase-I (1976-1982), phase-II (1983-1989), phase-III (1990-1996), phase-IV (1997-2003), phase-V (2004-2010) and phase-VI (2011-2017). Phase-wise CAGR was calculated for all the districts and Garrett ranking technique is employed for further ranking of phases across six regions of the country. Phase-I is identified as the phase with high rate of growth in agricultural advances in selected districts across all regions except southern where it is ranked second. The policy initiatives of that period i.e. setting of priority sector lending targets and establishment of Regional Rural Banks have played crucial role in this growth phenomenon of agricultural advances. Further recent policies like doubling agricultural package and ground level credit policies have also played crucial role in the growth of agricultural advances at grass root level in all regions except eastern and north-eastern regions. Whereas in the eastern and north-eastern ...

The Icelandic-English parallel corpus MaCoCu-is-en 1.0 was built by crawling the ".is" internet top-level domain in 2021, extending the crawl dynamically to other domains as well. All the crawling process was carried out by the MaCoCu crawler (https://github.com/macocu/MaCoCu-crawler). Websites containing documents in both target languages were identified and processed using the tool Bitextor (https://github.com/bitextor/bitextor). Considerable efforts were devoted into cleaning the extracted text to provide a high-quality parallel corpus. This was achieved by removing boilerplate and near-duplicated paragraphs and documents that are not in one of the targeted languages. Document and segment alignment as implemented in Bitextor were carried out, and BicleanerAI (https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner-ai) and Bifixer (https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer) were used for fixing, cleaning, and deduplicating the final version of the corpus. While the TXT format consists solely of pairs of source and target segments (one or several sentences), each segment pair in the TMX format is accompanied by the following metadata: - source and target document URL; - quality score as provided by the tool BicleanerAI; - translation direction identification: the source segment in each segment pair was identified by using a probabilistic model; - personal information identification ("biroamer-entities"): segments containing personal information are flagged, so final users of the corpus can decide whether to use these segments; - language variants: the language variant of English (British or American) was identified for every segment pair on document and domain level. Notice and take down: Should you consider that our data contains material that is owned by you and should therefore not be reproduced here, please: (1) Clearly identify yourself, with detailed contact data such as an address, telephone number or email address at which you can be contacted. (2) Clearly identify the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. (3) Clearly identify the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient in order to allow us to locate the material. (4) Please write to the contact person for this resource whose email is available in the full item record. We will comply with legitimate requests by removing the affected sources from the next release of the corpus. This action has received funding from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341. This communication reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1405.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431.

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1388. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (from November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.1 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. As opposed to the previous version 2.0, this version corrects some errors in various corpora and adds the information on upper / lower house for bicameral parliaments. The vertical files have also been changed to make them easier to use in the concordancers.

Icelandic politics are analysed from the perspectives of three normative models of democracy: the liberal, republican and deliberative democratic theories. While the Icelandic constitution is rooted in classical liberal ideas, Icelandic politics can be harshly criticized from a liberal perspective, primarily because of the unclear separation of powers of government and for the extensive involvement of politics in other social sectors. Despite strong nationalist discourse which reflects republican characteristics, rooted in the struggle for independence from Denmark, republicanism has been marginal in Icelandic politics. In the years before the financial collapse, Icelandic society underwent a process of liberalization in which power shifted to the financial sector without disentangling the close ties that had prevailed between business and politics. The special commission set up by the Icelandic Parliament to investigate the causes of the financial collapse criticized Icelandic politics and governance for its flawed working practices and lack of professionalism. The appropriate lessons to draw from this criticism are to strengthen democratic practices and institutions. In the spirit of republicanism, however, the dominant discourse about Icelandic democracy after the financial collapse has been on increasing direct, vote-centric participation in opposition to the system of formal politics. While this development is understandable in light of the loss of trust in political institutions in the wake of the financial collapse, it has not contributed to trustworthy practices. In order to improve Icelandic politics, the analysis in this paper shows, it is important to work more in the spirit of deliberative democratic theory ; Peer Reviewed

Not Available ; It is a matter of pleasure that "ICAR HRM Policy: Training and Capacity Building"has been formulated for the first time based an National Training Policy - 2012 of Government of India for training and capacity enhancement of ICAR employees. This Policy focuses on the tenet of 'competency-based training for all' which means that all cadres should get due emphasis for training and capacity building. The Policy gives guidelines on competency framework; objectives; nature of training; training targets; role of ICAR and training institutions; trainer development; foreign training; funding; implementation, coordination, monitoring and evaluation. It also encompasses model training schemes for scientific, technical, administrative (including finance and accounts), stenographer services and skilled supporting staffs. The Policy envisages for transforming the employees of ICAR by developing strategic human resource management system, which shall look at the individual as a vital resource to be valued, motivated, developed and enabled to achieve the overall Organisation's mission and objectives. The Policy document has been finalised after long process of consultations, meetings and presentations with NAARM, Hyderabad, the Senior Officers' Committee (SOC) of ICAR and valued inputs received from SMDs and employees of ICAR for improvement with the concurrence of the IFD of ICAR. The Policy document was cleared by Administrative Sub-Committee of the Governing Body of ICAR and finally approved by the 242nd Meeting of Governing Body of ICAR Society on 29th November, 2017 for adoption and implementation in the ICAR system. ; Not Available

Afstaða Íslendinga til öryggismála hefur lítið verið rannsökuð frá því í lok kalda stríðsins. Í þessari grein eru kynntar niðurstöður könnunar um afstöðu til og hugmyndir um utanríkis- og öryggismál, en Félagsvísindastofnun HÍ vann könnunina í nóvember og desember 2016. Niðurstöður könnunarinnar eru settar í samhengi við þróun í öryggisfræðum, þá sérstaklega öryggisgeira (e. security sectors) verufræðilegt öryggi (e. ontological security) og öryggisvæðingu (e. securitization). Helstu niðurstöður eru að almenningur á Íslandi telur öryggi sínu helst stafa ógn af efnahagslegum og fjárhagslegum óstöðugleika og náttúruhamförum, en telur litlar líkur á því að hernaðarátök eða hryðjuverkaárásir snerti landið beint. Þessar niðurstöður eru í takmörkuðu samræmi við helstu áherslur stjórnvalda í öryggismálum og því mikilvægt að stjórnvöld átti sig á því hvernig hægt er að tryggja það að almenningur sé meðvitaður um þær forsendur sem áhættumat og öryggisstefna grundvallast á. ; Icelanders' views on security and foreign affairs since the end of the Cold War are an understudied issue. This article presents the findings of a large scale survey on the position and ideas about foreign affairs and security. The survey was conducted by the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland in November and December 2016. The results of the survey are placed in the context of developments in security studies, with an emphasis on security sectors, ontological security, and securitization. The main findings are that the Icelandic public believes that its security is most threatened by economic and financial instability, as well as natural hazards, but thinks there is a very limited chance of military conflict or terrorist attacks directly affecting the country. These findings are incongruent with the main emphases of Icelandic authorities, as they appear in security policy and political discourse. It is therefore important that the authorities understand how to engage with the public about the criteria upon which risk assessments and security policies are based. ; Peer Reviewed

Not Available ; Lecture delivered to farmers during Training on "Improved crop production" organized by Directorate of Mitigating Poverty in Western Rajasthan (MPoWeR: Government of Rajasthan) and CAZRI at Balesar (24-26 July 2017). ; Not Available

Eitt af meginmarkmiðum núgildandi aðalnámskrár (Mennta- og menningarmálaráðuneytið, 2011/2013) er að búa nemendur undir þátttöku í lýðræðislegu samfélagi. Samkvæmt þessu á grunnskólinn að vera sá staður sem veitir nemendum svigrúm til að öðlast reynslu af lýðræðislegu starfi og vera þátttakendur í því. Markmið þessarar rannsóknar var að kanna mögulegar breytingar á viðhorfum nemenda í þessum efnum yfir fimm ára tímabil, 2010 til 2015. Tveir hópar nemenda í 6.–10. bekk (Nalls = 627) voru spurðir um afstöðu sína til lýðræðis og lýðræðisþátttöku með fimm ára millibili. Rannsóknin var gerð í samvinnu við tíu skóla sem söfnuðu gögnum við reglubundið sjálfsmat. Niðurstöður sýna að viðhorf nemenda til lýðræðis í grunnskólum á Íslandi og lýðræðisþátttaka virðist hafa tekið mjög litlum breytingum á framangreindu tímabili. Engar breytingar var að finna á því sem kallað hefur verið frjálslynd lýðræðissjónarmið, svo sem tjáningarfrelsi og samkeppni í skólastofunni. Aftur á móti mátti greina smávægilega jákvæða breytingu á viðhorfum til þess sem kallað hefur verið samstarfslýðræði, þ.e. til þátttöku og samvinnu. Mikilvægi lýðræðisþátttöku að mati nemendanna virtist dala lítillega yfir þetta fimm ára tímabil. Niðurstöðurnar voru bornar saman við danska rannsókn frá árinu 2001 sem þessi rannsókn tók mið af. Enginn afgerandi munur fannst á viðhorfum dönsku og íslensku ungmennanna. Þó virtust frjálslynd lýðræðissjónarmið vera traustari hjá dönsku ungmennunum. ; The Icelandic national curriculum guide for compulsory schools published in 2011 specially emphasized the importance of preparing students for active participation in a democratic society: "It is expected that children and youth learn democracy by learning about democracy in a democracy" (Mennta- og menningarmálaráðuneytið, p. 19). Democracy was furthermore emphasized as one of six fundamental pillars of the Icelandic education system together with literacy, sustainability, health and welfare, human rights, equality, and creativity. Accordingly, knowledge about changes in attitudes towards democracy and democratic participation since the introduction of this new conception in 2011 is of importance. The increased emphasis on issues related to democracy introduced in the Icelandic national curriculum guide for compulsory schools were to be fully implemented in 2013. Studies on how Icelandic students are prepared for an active participation in the constantly changing democratic society are few and far between. Therefore, the results of this study can be considered of importance for education stakeholders such as teachers, parents, students, and scholars. The theoretical model used in the study is based on the works of Danish researchers (Jacobsen, Jensen, Madsen, Sylvestersen, & Vincent, 2004), where democratic perspectives in a Western tradition are conceived as liberal democracy (e.g., emphasizing the rights of the individual) and republican democracy (e.g., emphasizing solidarity). According to the model, both perspectives need to be in place for a democracy to function, and it is in the tension between these two perspectives a democratic process becomes active. The goal of this study is to contribute to an increased theoretical and empirical knowledge about democratic processes and democratic participation in public schools. The research was intended to detect possible changes in the responses of children to questions related to liberal and republican democracy after the full implementation of the Icelandic national curriculum guide from 2011. The goals of the study were approached by asking two groups of children in Grades 6 through 10 (Ntotal = 627) about their attitudes towards democracy and democratic participation in the classroom. The first data collection was conducted in 2010 and the second data collection was conducted in 2015. The study was conducted in collaboration with 10 schools that carried out the data collection as a part of their own internal evaluation. The results show that attitudes towards democracy and democratic participation over the above depicted period had changed remotely during the five-year period. No changes were found in attitudes related to a liberal democracy. A slight positive change was detected regarding opportunities for participation and collaboration in a republican democracy. However, the importance of democratic participation showed a slight decline during this five-year period. According to the model of Jacobsen et. al. (2004) one of the prerequisites for liberal democracy is individuality. A comparison with Danish result from 2001 showed that about 61% of the Danish adolescents indicated that it was very important to "be the way they are" but only 47% of the Icelandic adolescents responded the same way in 2015. These results were in accordance with other manifestations of liberal democracy in the survey, which seemed stronger among the Danish adolescents. The limited change in the attitudes of adolescents towards democracy and democratic participation raises questions about whether compulsory schools had the resources to implement the changes in policy recommended by the 2011 national curriculum guide. More research is needed to explore what was done in schools to increase democracy in the classroom during the 2011-2013 implementation period. Furthermore, it is important to conduct further research to identify efficient ways for teachers and school administrators to meet the policy recommendation for an increased emphasis of democracy in Icelandic classrooms. Finally, comparison with results from other countries give reason to conduct more research on manifestations of liberal democracy (e.g., opportunities for an open and democratic discussion; respect for individuality) among Icelandic adolescents. ; Peer Reviewed

Kosningaréttur er grundvallarréttur þegna í lýðræðisríkjum og þátttaka í kosningum álitin ein af mikilvægustu athöfnum borgaranna. Þó að þessi réttindi skuli tryggð öllum þegnum sýna alþjóðlegar rannsóknir að fatlað fólk er víða útilokað frá þátttöku í kosningum. Fatlað fólk er síður líklegt til að kjósa en ófatlað fólk og mætir iðulega ýmsum hindrunum ef það reynir að taka þátt í kosningum. Þessi grein fjallar um kosningaþátttöku fatlaðs fólks með hliðsjón af niðurstöðum alþjóðlegra rannsókna. Í upphafi eru raktar helstu hindranir í vegi kosningaþátttöku fatlaðs fólks og leitast við að svara hvaða áhrif þessar hindranir hafi, ekki aðeins fyrir fatlaða borgara, heldur jafnframt hvað það þýði fyrir heilbrigði lýðræðis og lýðræðislegra stofnana þegar hluti þegnanna mætir alvarlegum hindrunum varðandi borgaraleg grundvallarréttindi. Íslenskar rannsóknir á þessu sviði eru ekki fyrir hendi og engin skipuleg tölfræðileg gögn eru til varðandi þátttöku fatlaðs fólks í kosningum eða stjórnmálum hér á landi. Byggt á gögnum sem aflað var hjá tveimur fjölmennustu heildarsamtökum fatlaðs fólks hér á landi er rýnt í reynslu, aðstæður og möguleika fatlaðs fólks til þátttöku í kosningum á Íslandi, lagasetningar þar að lútandi og skyldur ríkisins til að stuðla að og tryggja þátttöku fatlaðs fólks í stjórnmálum og opinberu lífi, ekki síst í ljósi þess að Samningur Sameinuðu þjóðanna (SÞ) um réttindi fatlaðs fólks (SRFF) hefur verið fullgiltur hér á landi ; The right to vote is a fundamental right of citizenship in democratic nations, and participation in elections in one of the most important acts undertaken by citizens. Although these rights are guaranteed to all citizens, international research shows that disabled people are widely excluded from participation in elections. Disabled people are less likely to vote than non-disabled people and often encounter various obstacles when they try to participate in elections. This article discusses the voting participation of disabled people in consideration of the international research. The main barriers that disabled people encounter in the voting process will first be outlined. This will be followed by questions concerning the effects these obstacles produce, not only for disabled citizens, but what this means overall for the health of democracy and democratic institutions when a portion of the citizenry encounter serious obstacles concerning their basic civil rights. Icelandic research in this field is extremely limited and no systematic statistical data exists on the participation of disabled people in elections, or politics in general, in this country. Based on data drawn from sources from two of the largest disabled people's organization in the country, the focus here is on the experiences, circumstances and opportunities for disabled people to participate in elections in the country. The findings draw attention to the obligations of the state to promote and ensure the participation of disabled people in politics and public life in light of the recent ratification in Iceland of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) ; Peer Reviewed

Í þeirri lýðræðisvakningu sem varð á Íslandi eftir hrun mátti sjá hvernig ólíkir hópar byggðu lýðræðiskröfur og ákall um meira eða dýpra lýðræði á ólíkum hugmyndum um lýðræði. Kjarni þessara krafna var þó hinn sami: meira lýðræði þýddi aukin áhrif almennings á ákvarðanir og stefnumótun. Þannig undirstrikaði hin almenna umræða um lýðræði þann skilning að virkt samráð við almenning sé nauðsynlegur hluti lýðræðislegra stjórnarhátta. Í þessari grein er gerð tilraun til að varpa ljósi á ólíkt inntak lýðræðiskröfunnar eftir málefnum hverju sinni og athyglinni einkkum beint að þekkingarmiðuðu lýðræði. Því er haldið fram að þótt enn sé ekki hægt að segja að þekkingarmiðað lýðræði byggi á veigamiklum empíriskum rökum, þá bjóði það upp á áhugaverðustu leið samtímans til að hugsa um lýðræðisnýjungar. ; During the democratic awakening in Iceland during and after the financial crisis of 2008 it was evident that different groups based their demands for more or deeper democracy on different conceptions of democracy. Yet their demands had a common core: more democracy meant greater public influence on policy- and decision-making. Thus public discussion insisted on a conception of democracy according to which public consultation is a necessary part of democratic governance. This paper discusses different kinds of consultation depending on the particular demands in each case with particular emphasis on epistemic democracy. I argue that even though it can hardly be said that epistemic democracy is based on much empirical evidence yet, its approach is the most promising way to think about future democratic. ; Peer Reviewed ; Ritrýnt tímarit

Developing pedagogical material – interesting lessons, interesting lesson plans, grammar, grammar points, exercises etc. – is never an easy task, especially for a language like Hindi where preformulated resources are few. I developed these topic specific powerpoints presented here for instructional use in my class. As such, they have proved to be of immense use, acting as an ever developing "text," and for easy linkage on Blackboard as PDF files. Students have made good use of them inside as well as outside of the class. These powerpoints are presented here for fellow colleagues and Hindi learners for their instructional use, and for further development as they fine tune them for their particular needs. While the topics in question do have a grammar orientation to them, they are not the only "text" the instructor should use in class. They should be used in conjunction with the instructor's own creative lesson plan, supplementing material with these powerpoints where grammar and cultural points need to be highlighted. ; Asian Studies

This chapter explores the possible influences of Sweden, Denmark and Finland on the Environmental Policy of the EU. We focus specifically on the reputation, expertise and role model behaviour of the Nordic EU members and their possibilities to use these factors as cognitive power resources.The chapter discusses several examples where the Nordic EU member states have successfully promoted their national environmental interests within the EU. We also make use of interviews with environmental representatives at the Swedish, Danish and Finnish Permanent Representations to the EU in Brussels, officials from other member states, DG Environment of the Commission and the European Environment Agency. The results indicate that the Nordic EU members have to some extent minimised their quantitative disadvantages, such as small administrations and limited voting powers, by successfully using the cognitive power resources in question within the Environmental Policy of the European Union.