Suchergebnisse

This paper aims at documenting the experience of the Environmental Research Center at the Royal Scientific Society in stakeholder participation in greywater management (treatment and reuse) in the rural communities in the northeastern Badia of Jordan. Stakeholders participating in the management process included local people, nongovernmental organizations, community-based organizations, governmental authorities, scientists and experts from universities and research institutions. The local stakeholders committee, NGOs, CBOs and local people have participated in capacity-building programs, data collection, situation analysis, problems identification, selection of types and locations of treatment technologies and construction and operation of treatment units and reuse projects. Experts, scientists and governmental entities contributed to the development of a treatment technology selection matrix and identification the best technology that suits the study area. The study reveals that the incorporation of input from a broad range of sectors and stakeholders during the project insured cooperative management of the greywater resources and enhanced project quality and ownership.

This volume describes the "Swedish part" (WP4) of the EU project COMPLEX, which has been dealing with pathways to a low carbon society with the Stockholm-Mälar region in focus. COMPLEX started on 1 October 2012 and ended after four years, on 30 September 2016. The central theme of the WP4 research has been to use the Stockholm-Mälar region as a sort of a "laboratory" for modelling and stakeholder interactions, but also for providing backgrounds, perspectives, tools and suggested policy outlines.

The object of this thesis is to describe, analyze and understand the terms and meanings of the public information and the political communication for local democracy, in today´s media landscape, out of the interaction between the main parties of the local society in Sjöbo and Ystad and from the stand point of earlier research and theories. The study has analyzed the actions performed by citizens, politicians, employees and journalists as well as the scenes for this information and communication. The interplay is a never ending power struggle between the three parties, concerning the accessibility of information and communication, especially to the kind that is given and takes place in informal, nonofficial rooms and channels which are not publicly accessible. Theories by M Weber, E Goffman, Z Bauman, M Foucault, J Habermas etc are being used. Case study method has given rise to three themes. The first describes how the increasing demands of rationalization, are displayed in the everyday practice, how it manifests in the interaction between the three parties, where processes of rationalization undermine the possibilities of dialogue. The second theme describes how the three parties use different strategies in order to obtain or keep the power of the information and the communication and thus the power of the politics, how the definitions of the main parties can be deconstructed and how the power can shift from one actor to another, depending on available power positions. Those in power withdraw themselves from communication with the citizens in different ways,by the use of different power techniques, which leads to a dynamic resistance where both journalists and citizens work out counter strategies. The public speech about the need to revitalize the civic sphere has been prominent for a long time. The third theme thus describes this promising speech of the public information and the political communication, how it has been handled and what the consequences are. The empirical material displays that the holders of the traditional power positions, tend to polish this visible side. The cosmetic considerations have proved to be the most significant ones in the studied practice and do play a significant part in the contemporary discursive practice as well as it terms the public information and the political communication. Those in power try to project the cosmetic democracy and the speech of new opportunities, on democracy, on the importance of communication and information and of participating, have become necessary ingredients in the cosmetic democracy, which is increasing. This does not mean that all democracy being exercised is cosmetic. Nevertheless, the surface and the speech of democracy become more distant from the content, by all the talk of its splendid qualities.

It is argued that political-administrative organizations are becoming increasingly complex with more horizontal governance required. In Swedish municipal administration, there is a group of administrators assigned the task of monitoring and promoting strategic topics that should be integrated horizontally within the organization. Examples of strategic topics are sustainability, safety/security, diversity, children/youth, public health, human rights, and gender equality. In the thesis, these administrators are called cross-sector strategists. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how cross-sector strategists become a part of the political-administrative organization when representing, enacting, and reflecting on values in the undertaking of their formal posts. They are situated between the tradition of vertical governance, with formal procedures and hierarchy as its foundation, and the tradition of horizontal governance, with informal networks and deliberation as its foundation. Previous research has shown that this is likely to give rise to value conflicts, and the question is if cross-sector strategists experience value conflicts, and if so, how they cope with them. The cross-sector strategists are studied in this thesis from the perspective of situated agency – focusing on both the contextual expectations of the cross-sector strategists and on their internal reflections to solve value conflicts – in order to explore their process of becoming a part of the local government administration. A mixed-methods design is applied, containing analysis of job advertisements for cross-sector strategists, public managers, and social workers; in-depth interviews with cross-sector strategists; and a survey of professional networks for cross-sector strategists. The results show that cross-sector strategists are subjects to ambivalent and often-contradictory contextual expectations. Cross-sector strategists use the ambivalence of their work for their strategic purposes, and such ambivalence allows them to reframe their topics, their methods, their arguments, and their identity according to current situation in order to increase the impact of their assigned topics and diminish the inner conflict of wanting to be both a responsive bureaucrat and an active lobbyist. Combining these two dedications requires them to be highly reflexive and flexible actors. The outcome of cross-sector strategists' coping with value conflicts can be interpreted in two ways: 1) as if the cross-sector strategists are a formal tool to safeguard crucial democratic and ethical values due to the cross-sector strategists' method of sneaking the strategic policy areas into the organization. Or 2) as a to democracy risky administrative behavior in the long-term due to the disguising of value conflicts and diminished possibilities to process these value conflicts

At the centre of this study lies one of the critical questions faced by (late-)modern society, namely that of taking care of the long-lived radioactive waste from nuclear power production. The problems of nuclear waste management are pictured as embracing a complex web of essential issues for society today, in terms of both its capacities and its shortcomings – so called core issues. The principal aim of the thesis is to examine the nuclear waste discourse in Malå, Västerbotten, from a critical discourse analytical perspective, through applying the approach developed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Discourse. During the 1990s, the municipality of Malå played a prominent role as a candidate site for the geological disposal of Sweden's spent nuclear fuel. A five-year process culminated in a local referendum on whether detailed site investigations should be permitted within the community. Following the result no further investigations have been undertaken. The discourse analysis is carried out through a study of opinion formation in the municipality during the period October 1992 to October 1997. Two main types of empirical material have been collected: interviews with opinion leaders (politicians, activists, journalists, information professionals, etc.) and contemporaneous mass media content (the local newspaper and regional television news). In the empirical analysis, a review is made of the workings of the external and internal control mechanisms within the discourse; that is to say, how they serve to set limits on the content and form of the sense-making process concerning nuclear waste management. Important themes in the opinion forming process in Malå include information and expertise, opposition and legitimacy, the centre/periphery relationship and the themes of mistrust, partitioning and rejection. Among other themes identified as being marginalised or absent, one example is the Samish citizens' views on the nuclear question. Four actors play a prominent role as authors of the discourse, namely the nuclear industry, the experts, Greenpeace and the mass media. The voices of resistance groups are also significant. Representatives from authorities and civil servants were most likely to take the commentary role in the discourse, along with journalists. In the concluding analysis of the nuclear waste discourse in Malå, two main types of desire for truth, which form the discourse's main order, are identified. The stronger concerns the will to know, which places the expert with a scientific background as the principal truth-teller. The other is 'ordinary' people's desire, which influences the content and form of the opinion formation. It is also concluded that the mass media institutions play a significant role in this context, not least as mediators. Reflections on contemporary 'core issues' to which the analysis bears witness, such as the crisis of democracy, are also included. In addition, the implications of applying the Foucaultian research programme to a study of the nuclear question have been considered.

This dissertation addresses party-culture in political parties represented in the Swedish parliament. Party-culture is investigated by studying collective self-images and norms in Swedish parliamentary party-groups (PPG). The aim of this investigation is to contribute to understanding of the conditions under which parliamentary work is carried out. In order to expand our understanding of these conditions this dissertation looks beyond the formal processes by which party-groups deliver their political message and make decisions, and instead highlights the cultural aspects of these party organizations in the parliament. The method of analysis is qualitative and the material for the study consists of 53 interviews with members of parliament from all represented parties. The parties studied are thus the Social Democratic, Moderate, Liberal, Christian Democrats, Left, Centre, and Green. In addition, some participant observation for the 1998-2002 mandate period in used. The empirical investigation shows that party-culture is revealed via four basic themes: political ability, feelings of political responsibility, the importance social fellowship, and the party's strength in relation to individual party members. The party's culture based on the four themes noted above provides a theoretical structure for interpretation that combines an Aristotelian idea about basic knowledge types, sophia and phronesis, with cultural theorists Mary Douglas' grid-group-analysis. Based on this interpretation method it is shown that party-cultures distinguish themselves from each other in a way that diverges from the left-right spectrum that dominates Swedish politics. At the same time as the parties demonstrate differences in party-culture, there are also some similarities between the parties, and these similarities suggest that the parties have adjusted themselves to a more general culture within the parliament, most visibly the focus on factual knowledge and a certain requirement for modesty from party members. ; Konverterat ISBN: 978-91-554-5882-9

Authors stress that farm animal welfare (FAW) has become a mainstream contemporary societal demand worldwide, resulting in research conducted with FAW. The most popular type of research are surveys that analyse consumers' attitudes towards FAW, yet, these are limited geographically to the European Union, the United States, and Canada. Very few studies have been done in Latin America, regardless of evidence that suggests an expected increase in the social demand of FAW and its associated products. FAW related knowledge in terms of consumer preferences today, still scarce in Latin American countries, with only Mexico, Chile, and Brazil being the referent countries creating scientific publications that address FAW. Nevertheless, such scientific publications often focus on farmers and slaughter practices, excluding consumers' attitudes and perceptions. Thus, this study acknowledges that the agri-food chain is integrated by different actors, focusing on understanding what FAW is from the consumers' perception perspective. This study aimed to investigate the Mexican respondents' perceptions in their role of consumers of animal-based food when forming a meaning for FAW. Thus, a novel approach was embraced by applying the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) and interpreting the results based on the Means-End Chain (MEC) theory and the Schwartz's personal values theory; this approach, together with the findings, are the study's key contribution. The findings in this research suggest that when attaching a meaning for FAW, the meaning respondents build is complex, being integrated by a set of hierarchical relationships. These relationships are integrated by elements like attributes leading to consequences, to achieve a specific set of values. The study displays them graphically through a Hierarchical Value Map (HVM) representing the first-ever Mexican respondents' mental model when forming a meaning for FAW. By examining such elements, this study discovered that respondents consistently reflected FAW as a set of specific and distinctive characteristics in animal-based food; such characteristics are the attributes free from chemicals, more natural, higher quality, cruelty-free, better taste, ethical and artisan-made. Also, the respondents perceived FAW as a physiological or psychological result happening not to them as a person, but to the farmed animals, taking the form of a set of consequences that were consistently evoked by them and that reflect their thoughts of FAW being no pain/painless life, freedom of movement, free from stress, non-alteration of the animals' development, access indoor/outdoor, access to natural food and water, no overexploitation, dignified life, access to medical care, non-forced reproduction, access to socializing with their own species, access to rest and sleep, dignified slaughter and recognition of farmed animals as sentient beings the recurrent constructs. Finally, when thinking of FAW, the respondents ultimately reach three end-states: being compassionate, wellness, and achievement. The results displayed here might serve as a source of useful knowledge or a guideline when the time comes, and the actors in the agri-food chain -producers, distributors, marketers, and policy-makers- in Mexico decide to listen to the consumer concerns by embracing FAW practices and designing FAW frameworks which goal is the insurability of farm.

Security challenges arising from hybrid threats and hybrid warfare, HT&HW, are today high on security agenda not only in Sweden but across the globe. Despite the attention and the growing body of studies on the subject, there is a lack of research bringing attention to how these challenges can be addressed. This article contributes to such an approach by sharing the findings of a project that brings together practitioners and scholarly perspectives on this subject spanning the threats themselves as well as the tools and means to counter them. The article outlines the Western response to hybrid threats and hybrid warfare. It is argued that there is no single response to HT&HW, nor to building resilience. HT&HW need to be addressed through a comprehensive, all-inclusive approach. Finally, the article outlines how we address these challenges in practice.

-Sustainable landscapes require evidence-based knowledge about multiple goods, services and values, as well as integrated place-based collaboration among actors and stakeholders at multiple levels. -EUROSCAPES is an international network of researchers, journalists and practitioners that supports sharing of knowledge about how to maintain and develop sustainable landscapes. --Euro. is about the diversity of places in the European continent's East and West - from the Ural Mountains and Caucasus to the Atlantic Ocean. --.scapes links to the word landscape, which has biophysical, anthropogenic and perceived dimensions. -EUROSCAPES gathers and communicates knowledge using three series of publications: --EUROSCAPES News with short texts and illustrations that can be used by journalists. --EUROSCAPES Communication with popular summaries of peer-reviewed publications and reports. --EUROSCAPES Report with longer peer-reviewed comprehensive text. -EUROSCAPES uses the web site www.euroscapes.org to disseminate these publication series using five themes: People, Places, Practices, Projects, and Publications.

It may be challenging to see how illegal hunting, a crime that ostensibly proceeds as shoot, shovel and shut up in remote rural communities, at all communicates with the regime. Examining the socio-legal interplay between hunters and state regulation, however, clarifies illegal hunting to be part of a politically motivated pattern of dissent that signals hunters' disenfranchisement from the polity. While few contemporary illegal hunters cut conscientious figures like Robin Hood, their violation of illegitimate law may likewise testify to a profound disjuncture between legality and legitimacy. This is the premise taken in the following research. Here it is observed contemporary Swedish hunters experience the deliberative system pertaining to wildlife and wolf conservation to be systematically stacked against them and unable to serve as a site for critical law-making that provides equal uptake of all voices. One manifestation of their growing disenfranchisement is the establishment of a counterpublic mobilised on the basis of shared semantics for the sorts of deliberative deficits they argue befall them in the present. Within the remit of their counterpublic, hunters undertake and justify illegal hunting along with other forms of disengaging dissent like abstentions, non-compliance, boycotts and conscientious refusals with state agencies. The research captures hunters' dissent in Smith's deliberative disobedience, a deliberative and Habermasian grounded reinterpretation of the more familiar classical theory of civil disobedience. On this perspective, illegal hunting signals a deficit in the deliberative system, which hunters both bypass by taking an alternative conduit for contestation, and draw attention to when they undertake dissent. The dissent in this case study is deconstructed in terms of its grammar—as simultaneously engaging and disengaging with the premises of power—and in terms of its communicative content. Set within the field of Environmental Communication, the dissertation is intended as an empirical and theoretical contribution to a discussion on the boundaries of political dialogue in the context of civic disenfranchisement: it asks whether some of hunters' dissent may be parsed as a call for a more inclusive debate, or as dialogic acts in themselves. Finally, it presents ways toward short-term and longer-term reconciliation of hunters with the deliberative system, drawing on the work of contestatory citizen mini-publics from the third wave of deliberative democracy.

The Swedish Social Insurance Agency is an important part of the Swedish welfare state. The Agency has recently made a number of major changes, such as establishing a new internal organization and reforming processes for decision making. Many of these changes have been controversial. Critics have complained that the Agency shows a lack of efficiency, has failed to make payments on time, and has been too harsh in its application of eligibility rules. The changes have put the agency at a number of crossroads, many of them recurring from earlier reforms, in dealing with problems such as regional differences in the application of rules. In this article, some of these choices are discussed. The discussion departs from four dichotomies: uniformity-local adaptation; centralization-decentralization; specialization-generalist approaches; and closeness-distance. These dichotomies are illustrated with examples from the agency. The general conclusion is that although the change process has taken a rocky road, there has been a great deal of internal consistency in the combination of measures taken.

The aim of this study is to investigate the 1993 reform and the process where control and management philosophies, systems of rules and regulations are assumed to apply both to the centuries of academic tradition of specific characteristics of organisation and cultural norms. Based on documents, educational political intentions and the plans of action which hereby arise I attempt to analyse the impact of the reform. New planning and control systems and goal and achievement-related allocation of resources are being introduced at the same time as the country's seats of learning are becoming independent authorities with the right to create their own internal organisation. The new government wants to achieve a decentralisation of decisions-making, responsibility and authority, and to follow up and evaluate operations and results. A particular enquiry has been set up, RUT-93, with the aim of studying the position the individual establishments of higher education take in practice towards the aims of the reform, intentions and to the new possibilities for freedom that are provided. From a qualitative point of view I analyse how the country's seats of learning react and act in relation to these new preconditions on the basis of a questionnaire and a referral from the RUT-93 enquiry, as well as my own additional empirical material in the form of personal interviews. I reach the conclusion that the state authorities use the concept of freedom to explain a moving away from a centrally controlled system at the same time that strengthened central control is perceived at the country's seats of learning, as connections are made between allocation of resources and demands for achievement, follow-up and results attained. The strategy behind the RUT-93 enquiry is to ensure that a process of reform survives even if the right-wing government were to lose power after one mandate period. The activities for which initiative is taken, however, acquire the nature of predictability as the aims of the reform and the directives of the report are viewed as being indeterminate and unclear for the country's seats of learning. I feel I have discovered at least four different horizons of interpretation for how the country's seats oflearning view the reform: the discourse of tradition, an organisational perspective, a power perspective and an undergraduate education perspective. It also appears to be the case that the traditional academic exercise of power is expected to be replaced by a model of control and management of a 'top-down' nature which applies to society as a whole and where control of aims, economy and results is the guiding principle. There also seems to be a connection between the concepts of fraternity, management and democracy, where the concept of classic academic is often associated with and even used synonymously with concepts such as fraternal, democratic, nonhierarchical and 'bottom-up' -Ollented, while the concept of management-oriented is often used as an explanation of a hierarchy or a 'top-down' philosophy of some kind. I have tried to describe how the 1993 reform of higher education must be understood on the basis of the existential, societal, historical and gender-dependent fabric so that it does not hang loose and floating. A summarising conclusion contains the plausible fact that both state authorities and tax-payers have an interest in the fact that the operations which are run at higher education establishments is in concord with what is happening in society in general, which, however, does necessarily mean that operations must be run or controlled on the basis of the same principles or rules as other state authorities and even less on the basis of what applies to organisations and companies. ; Licentiatavhandling framlagd vid Lärarhögskolan, Stockholmsuniversitet den 12 mars, 1997. Opponent: Agneta Linné, Lärarhögskolan i Stockholm.

Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

Why do people engage in high-cost political activities such as forming new political parties? Start-up costs are high. Moreover, rewards are unclear and uncertain. Since political parties are collective goods, people demanding new political parties face a collective action problem. It is therefore somewhat puzzling that new parties emerge. Drawing on theories from economics, sociology and political science, I argue that we, in order to understand the emergence of new parties, need to analytically move in on party-entrepreneurs to elucidate what motivates them. Methodologically inspired by the debate on bridging the gap between deductive and inductive strategies, I process-trace and compare three cases. The case studies identify individual level-mechanisms producing the decision toform a new party. People that voice demands within established parties, and face outright rejection, have experienced bad treatment from established politicians. These experiences contribute to disappointment, anger, and a sense of indignation - i.e. "intense emotions"- that mobilize entrepreneurs. Intense emotions create a lust for revenge, which becomes a psychological selective incentive, and is important for understanding why people engage themselves in high-cost political activities. ; Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Groundwater monitoring is recommended as a higher-tier option in the regulatory groundwater assessment of crop protection products in the European Union. However, to date little guidance has been provided on the study designs. The SETAC EMAG-Pest GW group (a mixture of regulatory, academic, and industry scientists) was created in 2015 to establish scientific recommendations for conducting such studies. This report provides recommendations for study designs and study procedures made by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Environmental Monitoring Advisory Group on Pesticides (EMAG-Pest). Because of the need to assess the vulnerability to leaching in both site selection and extrapolating study results, information on assessing vulnerability to leaching is also a major topic in this report. The design of groundwater monitoring studies must consider to which groundwater the groundwater quality standard is applicable and the associated spatial and temporal aspects of its application, the objective of the study, the properties of the active substance and its metabolites, and site characteristics. This limits the applicability of standardised study designs. The effect of the choice of groundwater to which the water quality guideline is applied on study design is illustrated and examples of actual study designs are presented.