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Scholarship in international law aims at addressing global forest governance comprehensively. This article reviews the recent contribution Global Forest Governance - Legal Concepts and Policy Trends by Rowena Maguire and puts it into the perspective of recent political and policy science research on global forests. While finding Maguire's volume being a very timely and valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary discussions on international forest governance, we identify some weaknesses which are mostly rooted in methodological critique and a lack of a systematic framework for analysis.

Framsida; Innehållsförteckning; Förord; I. Reformism och utopism?; II. Wigforss pragmatistiska position; III. Ett annat samhälle är möjligt att tänka sig; IV. Ett annat samhälle är möjligt att utforma; V. Ett annat samhälle är möjligt att skapa engagemang för; VI. Wigforss och socialdemokratins framtid; VII. Pragmaticism, reformism och utopism; Referenser; Baksida

Already from the title of this dissertation can two important points be made. The first is that the dissertation is about the relationship between central and local government, more specifically in Sweden today. The second point is that this relationship is seen from a balance of power perspective, where the relative power of the actors is an empirical question rather than derived from a given hierarchical structure. Such a perspective is based on analysing the actors as interdependent. The central government can thus be dependent on the local government, as well as the other way around, and this interdependence can vary over time and between policy areas. This perspective differs from that of most studies, which often see the relationship either in terms of steering (that local governments are executing centrally determined policies) or local self-government (that the Swedish local governments has a constitutionally protected right to handle their own affairs within certain legal limits). I argue that both these perspectives take a hierarchical point of departure and are, to a large degree, static in their approaches, which means that they risk not discovering, or have problem explaining, changes in the relation between central and local government. To view the relationship between central and local government as interdependence leads to a focus on the resources that the actors possess. For public organisations the most relevant resources are: authority-related resources, financial resources, political resources, informational resources, and organisational resources. The central government has a power advantage concerning authority and financial and political resources while local governments generally have an advantage in terms of informational and organisational resources. The policy area chosen is Swedish refugee policy. The basic paradox within this area is that the central government grants the refugees asylum but cannot give them a place to live without the permission of the local government. This permission is accomplished through voluntary agreements signed between the National Integration Office and the local governments. It is then the local governments that integrate the refugees to Swedish society by providing housing, education, healthcare and so on while the central government is giving the local government a grant to cover the expenses. The central government has lacked political, informational and authority-related resources. The resource used to compensate for this has been the financial resource. By economic incentives the central government has encouraged local governments to increase their refugee reception. This has been the central government's universal weapon and has been used to reduce its vulnerability as well as its sensitivity. For local governments, authority-related and financial resources have been lacking. The resource that the local governments have had, all the way through the time period studied here, is the organisational resource. This is something that the central government simply cannot provide and this is why there is a relationship of interdependence – just as only the central government has authority in its power base, the local level is the only one with organisational resources.

This dissertation examines key characteristics and factors shaping the leadership style of Swedish Prime Ministers (PMs). Based on the research of the American presidency, an interactionist framework is developed which draws upon institutional theory and political psychological theory. The analysis is advanced by exploring multiple sources and is based on four cases of leadership styles: two single party Social Democratic PMs, Ingvar Carlsson and Göran Persson, as well as two center/right coalition PMs, Thorbjörn Fälldin and Carl Bildt. Leadership style is studied through a focused comparison of the PMs' performance of four functions. Thus, the four PMs are studied as staffers and organizers of the cabinet and the Government Offices, decision makers, communicators and crisis managers. The results indicate that the office of the PM is elastic, accommodating a wide-ranging variation of leadership styles. The Social Democratic PMs display the most uniform leadership styles, but, rather surprisingly, they also have the most dissimilar leadership styles among the four cases. The center/right PMs' approaches differ to a great extent from one another, displaying mixed forms of leadership styles. The analysis explains how the PMs' leadership styles are shaped based on the interaction between their distinct personal characteristics and surrounding institutions. Thus, the dissertation concludes that leadership theories developed in a presidential setting are largely applicable in a parliamentary setting and that political behavior is not dictated by institutions such as formal structures or norms. The results encourage a reassessment of how personality, as an explanatory factor, is applied in mainstream political science. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the need for reconsidering the presidentialisation thesis and the notion of dominant leadership as there are alternative pathways to prime ministerial influence which are disregarded in the debate.

In this research anthology, inequality in Swedish working life in a Sweden marked by increased inequality, is studied. Racialised inequality, racism and discrimination in individual workplaces are focused, but inequalities based on class and gender are also studied. The concept of inequality regime is used by several of the authors to analyse work organizations. The workplaces studied are found in different sectors, not least in healthcare. The book also includes contributions that provide comparative international perspectives and studies of the development of inequality over time. The anthology contains 12 chapters based on empirical studies of working life, one chapter that analyses working life inequality from a political theory perspective, an introduction and a closing chapter that frames and draws conclusions from the different studies, as well as an afterword. The authors are 22 researchers from different social science disciplines.

This dissertation examines the last thirty years of internal reforms in the Swedish Government Offices. Analysis of the evolution of personnel politics, the formation of one agency and the attempts to introduce a collective activity planning model, show that the immediate problems of the early 1970's – an over dimensioned staff, territory battles and unclear division of responsibility for personnel and organisation – remains to this day, notwithstanding the many reforms to approach them. One principal explanation behind this is that the key players for successful reorganisations – the politicians – do hardly ever partake. Instead, and on the basis of the perspective of bureaucratic politics, this dissertation demonstrates that the internal development of the Government Offices should be explained as the result of struggles between different bureaucratic actors, with diverse views on problems and their solutions, and with various prospects and strengths to affect the outcome. Due to the choice of politicians to leave this policy field open to bureaucratic politics, the policy is essentially shaped and decided within a bureaucratic context. The dissertation ends in a conclusion that there is an almost constant bureaucratic battle behind internal organisation of the Government Offices, a conflict where tradition, values and strong bureaucratic actors play an important part, and where institutional change is exceptional, since the preserving powers in these processes have the upper hand. But politicians can change – in spite of these traditions, values and bureaucratic agents – if they have the determination. The theoretical aim of this dissertation, through a critical assessment of the bureaucratic politics perspective – an evaluation motivated by the empirical data and inspired by two challenging and related theoretic models; sociological and historical institutionalism – is to display the qualities and shortcomings of the bureaucratic politics model, to develop and improve the original model of bureaucratic politics, and making it more expedient for future studies of institutional change in central political organisations.

Regional politics is changing; it is transforming from being mainly a responsibility of the central state to a concern that is more for the regional or local governments. At the same time, there are signs of a transformation of the political system in general. The development indicates a decreasing hierarchy as the power of the state is challenged and the political agents are increasing in number. This indicates that the political agents are changing but there are also indications that the political forms are transforming. The politics is increasingly characterised by project and process politics, networks, cooperation and partnerships. This transformation is generally described as the transformation "from government to governance". New governance is one of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary political science literature, and this has led to a wide variety of conceptualizations. Considering the changing regional politics and general changes as the political forms and agents, this thesis studies who governs the regional politics and how regional politics is governed.The purpose of this thesis is to provide empirical contributions in order to increase the understanding of changes in regional politics at the local level. This is done by dividing governance modes into typologies. Four political processes at the local level in the municipality of Åre between the years 1973-2007 are analyzed. The thesis is based on qualitative semi-structured elite interviews. The informants have been selected by snowball sampling. The interviews have also been complemented by documentary studies. The documents that have been studied are the protocols from the municipal assembly from 1973, when the municipality was created, to􀂒􀂟2007. The documents also consist of the parish archives (sockenkrönikor) governmental reports and official documents of the local and state-level government. The material has been analyzed by using process tracing.The main results of the study are that there have been changes in the regional politics at the local level in relation to the political agents and the forms of politics. The 1970s were characterized by strong state power and hierarchy. The political processes have increasingly been characterized by the typology of the new governance. The study has shown that in practice the regional politics in Åre is characterized by both traditional governance and new governance at the same time there has not been a paradigmatic shift. The elements of new governance are increasing but there are still significant signs of the traditional bureaucratic system such as hierarchy and ordered rule. As the signs of new governance increase, the political entrepreneurs play a bigger role in the processes being analyzed. The study also shows that the critique of traditional forms of governance relating to participation and influence has not become irrelevant as the signs of new governance increases.

The EU Renewable Energy Strategy (RES) Directive requires that each member state obtain 20% of its energy supply from renewable sources by 2020. If fully implemented, this implies major changes in institutions, infrastructure, land use, and natural resource flows. This study applies a political geography perspective to explore the transition to renewable energy use in the heating and cooling segment of the Swedish energy system, 1980–2010. The Nordic welfare model, which developed mainly after the Second World War, required relatively uniform, standardized local and regional authorities functioning as implementation agents for national politics. Since 1980, the welfare orientation has gradually been complemented by competition politics promoting technological change, innovation, and entrepreneurship. This combination of welfare state organization and competition politics provided the dynamics necessary for energy transition, which occurred in a semi-public sphere of actors at various geographical scales. However, our analysis, suggest that this was partly an unintended policy outcome, since it was based on a welfare model with no significant energy aims. Our case study suggests that state organization plays a significant role, and that the EU RES Directive implementation will be uneven across Europe, reflecting various welfare models with different institutional pre-requisites for energy transition.

The concept of civil society has lately become fashionable in political as well as scientificcontexts. This article critically discusses the 'politics of truth' in A Persistent Democracy!, thefinal report of the Swedish Commission on Democracy. The argument in the article is that thereport over-stresses the importance of civil society and the role of individual responsibilitiesand initiatives against public arrangements and interventions, referred to in the report as statepaternalism. The report is making specific 'technologies of government' visible, as it is creatingcitizens as primarily 'moral human beings'. The problem with strategies to 'roll back theState' for the benefit of a civil society of this kind, is that they necessarily open up for inequalitiesand conflicts in-built in civil society. To deepen democracy presupposes a continuouslong-term struggle for changing predominant power structures and unequal distributionsof vital resources, material and non-material. In this perspective, the report of the Swedish Commission on Democracy does not offer an adequate answer to challenging questions forthe future of a vitalized Swedish democracy. ; Reprint ur Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 2000 (http://www.statsvetenskapligtidskrift.se/section.asp?id=552)

Intro -- Brev till mamma Vincent -- Tack -- Social aspekt -- Första mellanakten -- Introduktion -- Kamikaze -- Jag ser fattiga människor... -- Gangnam Style -- Politisk aspekt -- Andra mellanakten -- Falska Profetior -- Korruptibilitet -- Mohamed Bouazizi -- Ekonomisk aspekt -- Tredje mellanakten -- Say Whaaat?!(Vad sa du?!!) -- MÄndring av paradigmet -- Fjärde mellanakten -- D.R.I.P. -- Diamanter är alla kvinnors bästa vän -- Hop-o'-My-Thumb -- Blueprint -- Femte mellanakten -- Det nuvarande ohyfsade samhället -- Abracadabra -- Skyhögt -- Cirkeln är sluten -- NOTES -- Och slutligen.

En tredjedel av all mat som produceras försvinner på vägen. Det innebär att en stor del av den negativa miljöpåverkan som livsmedelsproduktionen står för, har skett alldeles i onödan. I EU:s livsmedelsstrategi är matsvinn en av nyckelfrågorna.

The main purpose of this essay was to study whether niche parties that were represented in municipal councils in Sweden during the 2007-2010 term of office were politically relevant. Furthermore, factors that might facilitate political relevance for niche parties were studied. Political relevance was studied using two theoretical perspectives. The objective model of political relevance presents four categories of relevance based on the relations between political parties in a political assembly; governing parties, coalition parties, blackmail parties and isolated parties. The subjective model of political relevance relies on the party representatives' own judgments of the relevance of their parties. To study objective and subjective political relevance, party representatives were interviewed. The results showed that seven out of eight niche parties were politically relevant according to the objective model, and six out of eight niche parties were relevant according to the subjective model. For the study of possible facilitating factors, a comparative table was formed using statistics and official data. Percentage of seats and type of majority coalition seemed to affect the possibilities for niche parties to become governing parties. A large percentage of seats and being represented on the municipal executive board and committees seemed to facilitate subjective political relevance.

During the last decades, the public sector in Western democracies has undergone drastic changes. These changes have meant privatization and a more diverse service provision. Because of privatization, activities that were previously reserved for the public sector can now be conducted by the private sector. This has led to the traditional hierarchical model to be challenged by a new governing style throughmarket mechanisms, which was introduced during the 1980s. Both the hierarchical model and market model have since been supplemented by the network model that was introduced in the 1990s. The new organization has meant that steering is currently done in a complex environment with varying outcomes. In the foreground of the theoretical concepts that captures the development describedearlier is governance. The starting point of the governance perspective is that the traditional bureaucracy model for governing is challenged by new forms of organization and steering. In the early 1990s, it became possible, due to a change in legislation, to startindependent schools with public funding. This legislation change has had a major impact on the Swedish school system in terms of organization and steering issues. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the ideals of hierarchy, market andnetworking appear in the municipal steering of the local school system, and how these ideals affect the development and the intensity of the conflicts in the surveyed municipalities. The focus of the empirical study is three municipalities from the northern parts of Sweden, which are equal in terms of population, number of school pupils, the number of independent schools and with the samepolitical majority. The overall result of the thesis is that different governing ideals affect the levels of conflict in different ways. The municipality governed by marked ideals exhibit thehighest degree of conflict and the municipality governed by the network ideal exhibit lower levels of conflict. The municipality governed by the hierarchical ideal in the middle of the conflict scale.

Vem har rätt till naturen, skogen och marken? Hur har äganderätt sett ut i Sverige historiskt, och vad grundar sig vår syn på äganderätt på? Den tidigmoderna äganderätten var inte lika strikt som den moderna – ett exempel på ett självorganiserat utnyttjande av allmänningar var fäbodväsendet. Men dessa allmänningar har minskat i takt med den biologiska mångfalden i jordbruksbygderna.