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High hopes for democracy and sustainability are placed on participatory planning. Policy makers and scholars argue that broad participation can revitalise democracy and tackle sustainability challenges. Yet, critics claim that power asymmetries stand in the way of realising the potential of participatory planning. In the everyday practices of planning, this controversy comes to a head. Here, planners interact with citizens, politicians and developers around making choices about places and societies. Planners' practices are contested and they are challenged by the complexity of power relations. They need conceptual tools to critically reflect on what power is and when it is legitimate. Reflective practice is a prerequisite for making situated judgements under conditions of contestation. Yet, the planning theories, which are most influential in practice, have not been developed with the intention of conceptualising power. Rational planning theory, which still is influential in practice, largely reduces planning into a technical power-free activity. Communicative planning theory, which underpins participatory practices, instead suggests that expert power ought to be complemented by inclusive dialogue. This theory criticises hierarchical power relations as domination, without providing elaborated understanding of other facets of power. Hence, the conceptual support for reflective practice is too reductive. The aim of this thesis is to rethink power in participatory planning by developing concepts that can enable reflective practice. I draw on power theory and explore the utility of treating power as a family resemblance concept in participatory planning. Applying this plural view, I develop a family of power concepts, which signifies different ideas of what power is. The usefulness of this "power family" is tested through frame analysis of communicative planning theory and Swedish participatory planning policy and practice. The result of the research is a family of power concepts that can enable reflective practice. 'Power to' signifies a dispositional ability to act, which planning actors derive from social order. This ability can be exercised as consensual 'power with' or as conflictual 'power over'. The latter is conceptualised as an empirical process which, on a basic level, can be normatively appraised as illegitimate or legitimate. This thesis contributes to planning theory and environmental communication by problematising reductive notions of power and, as an alternative, rethinking power as a family resemblance concept. This theoretical contribution matters to planning practice as it can enable planners to develop their ability to be sensitive to what a situation requires, i.e. to acquire practical wisdom (phronesis).

The first part of this report provides an overview of the history of nuclear weapons doctrine, as it evolved in parallel to the practice of warfare and war planning in the mid-1940s and subsequently as an integral element of the cold war. A distinction is made between the early development of nuclear weapons doctrine, when United States held a dominant position in the field, and the near-parity situation that ensued in the late 1960s and onwards. The second part of the report consists of an analysis of American, British, French and Russian nuclear weapons doctrine between 1991 and 2018, illustrating how a period of low tension was gradually replaced with a reinvigoration of mutual suspicion after the year 2000. A third part briefly examines recent contributions to the American scholarly debate about the utility of nuclear weapons for strategic thought in a world moving toward polycentrism, as it revisits earlier theoretical insights and challenges conventional wisdoms. The fourth and final part elicits lessons for Sweden in particular. Overall, the report demonstrates that nuclear weapons consistently have represented an integral element of managing security risks in the Western hemisphere but that domestic political and defense industry considerations play in as well. It also suggests that doctrinal adjustments mirror the major concerns of policymakers in this regard and that nuclear powers are well aware of special obligations and privileges ascribed to them by countries that lack this category of weapons. A world in which the United States wields the greatest share of this power (unipolarity) will nonetheless be quite different from one in which two countries possess roughly the same capacity (bipolarity), and yet fundamentally different from one in which three or more countries compete to gain, or sustain, an edge toward others (multipolarity). To the extent that the world is moving toward greater security competition including the dimension of nuclear power, it will inevitably be more difficult for individual states to remain on the sidelines, unless they are ready to compromise their political autonomy. In terms of options for aligning Sweden with a broader security arrangement in the near future, there are only three feasible alternatives that may offset the risk of nuclear coercion: responding within the framework of the EU, forge closer ties to NATO, or build a bilateral relationship to the United States. Each such option comes with its own set of assets and liabilities, as does remaining a passive bystander. ; Transaltantisk och europeisk säkerhet , FORBE