Suchergebnisse

Design science research was used for the generation, use and evaluation of a model for knowledge sharing in the user community through open educational resources (OER). The focus of interest was on the development process of a model for knowledge sharing that emphasizes the characteristics and the needs of the user community; the empowerment and democratic issues of openness; the collaboration between institutions and dialog with society; and the consideration of quality and sustainability issues. Initially, the community needs were analyzed through surveys and workshops, and the findings used, through negotiations, to formulate the development process. An open-training platform served as an infrastructure and included a repository with OER, a wiki and a discussion forum. The purpose of this article is an attempt to provide universities with a plan and template for integrated knowledge sharing that responds to societal needs. Usability and usefulness has not been evaluated. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 size of a country's police force is of great public and political concern. In the 2006 national election campaign the opposition coalition promised that if they would be elected the number of police officers in Sweden would increase from about 17 500 to 20 000 by the year 2010. The coalition was elected and the political goal was achieved. The main question in this report is: What impact will such an increase of the number of police officers have on the crime rate? In this report previous research, mainly from the United States, is reviewed and thoroughly analyses of the relationship between police strength and domestic burglary, robbery, homicide and car related offences in Sweden are made. The data consists of a random sample of 145 municipalities studied between the years 2001 and 2008. A complementary data set consists of all 21 police forces in Sweden between 1995 and 2009. Through panel data analysis it is concluded that an increase of the local police by 10 percent would possibly reduce domestic burglary by 3 to 4 percent. No impact is found on robbery, car theft or homicide, however. More police officers also means that more drug offences are being registered and more crimes in general being cleared-up. The allocation of police officers is also briefly investigated in this study. About 30 percent of all police officers in Sweden are allocated to Stockholm County. This proportion has been fairly stable over the last 15 years. However, the population in this metropolitan area has increase by 20 percent since 1995, compared to about 3 percent in the rest of the country. One consequence is that the surplus of police officers per capita in Stockholm in relation to the number of officers per capita in the rest of the country has decreased substantially.

Ecological challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss lead to a need for change, but the radical changes that are required seem not to come about. One hot issue debated is who has the power and responsibility to change. This discussion has many different dimensions (e.g., between countries, or technological fixes vs radical system change) but here I base my study on the discussion of agency or structure. To put it simply, do we need to focus on structural political changes or rather on the level of the individuals and their consumerist lifestyles. This thesis aims to contribute to this debate by providing a better understanding of the (im)possibilities of individual lifestyle changes in a society that is largely organized to accommodate consumerist lifestyles. It does so by focusing on the example of Voluntary Simplicity, a lifestyle movement that advocates for a post-consumerist lifestyle. With the help of practice theory, which is especially fit to analyze everyday practices and change, and a qualitative interview study with seven voluntary simplifiers living in Sweden, I answer the following research questions: What are the motivations and drivers for having a voluntary simplicity lifestyle?, what are the challenges and obstacles that voluntary simplifiers need to overcome?, and does life, in consequence, get more complicated by striving for a "simpler" life because it is against the grain of society? The analysis demonstrates a motivation among the simplifiers to live sustainably and to reduce material possessions, working hours and stress. Impediments include the struggle of wanting to be part of a community but at the same time being different from the mainstream society, inflexible work structures and time and labor-intensive activities such as self-sufficiency. The question if life got simpler could not satisfactorily be answered and is connected to considerations on what life is about. In the discussion, I argue to consider social norms and values because they seem to exacerbate change both for politics and individuals. Future avenues for study could be based on participatory observation, autoethnography or doing research in non-capitalist-consumerist societies. This study is relevant because it opened up and contributed to the debate about change by acknowledging the entanglement of social structures and individuals.

Plant breeding has always relied on progress in various scientifc disciplines to generate and enable access to genetic variation. Until the 1970s, available techniques generated mostly random genetic alterations that were subject to a selection procedure in the plant material. Recombinant nucleic acid technology, however, started a new era of targeted genetic alterations, or precision breeding, enabling a much more targeted approach to trait management. More recently, developments in genome editing are now providing yet more control by enabling alterations at exact locations in the genome. The potential of recombinant nucleic acid technology fueled discussions about potentially new associated risks and, starting in the late 1980s, biosafety legislation for genetically modifed organisms (GMOs) has developed in the European Union. However, the last decade has witnessed a lot of discussions as to whether or not genome editing and other precision breeding techniques should be encompassed by the EU GMO legislation. A recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union indicated that directed mutagenesis techniques should be subject to the provisions of the GMO Directive, essentially putting many precision breeding techniques in the same regulatory basket. This review outlines the evolving EU regulatory framework for GMOs and discusses some potential routes that the EU may take for the regulation of precision breeding.

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.