This paper examines the Swedish experience of network governance in managing flooding and high flows in Swedish rivers. The aim is to study the networks' organizations and approaches to decision making, and the focus of the paper is on the regional responsibility for coordinating risk awareness and risk analysis in terms of information, prevention and actions. We argue that the absence of central guidelines in the organization of the networks and the fact that the networks are enforced by the government rather than spontaneously formed by participants have resulted in different solutions in terms of focus, organization and decision making, with implications for the networks' effectiveness and the exchange of experience among the networks. These differences and their effects are analyzed in this paper. The study concludes that as a consequence of the vague instructions from the government, the River Groups differ in terms of both decision making and organization, which affect the internal work and organization of the groups. The conclusions reached here are based on interviews with the coordinators of the county administrative boards, complemented by a document study and a literature review.
Following its achievement of Self-Rule status in 2009 Greenland embarked on a series of measures to diversify its economy with an eye towards eventually gaining full independence from Denmark. Tourism was underlined as a key sector for reaching this goal and, consequently, over the last few years there has been a concerted effort to develop the island as an important polar destination. Significantly, the Greenlandic government created the tourism development policy for 2016-2020, which it views as a key instrument for shaping the sector's future. In this paper, we adopted a policy network approach to determine the relational architecture among various stakeholders from the public and private sectors who are seen as relevant to tourism's development. Inter alia, we examined how these actors were linked to each other while examining what kind of tourism networks existed in Greenland and what obstacles might hinder or foster their formation. A thematic analysis of qualitative data on Atlas.ti reveals that though there exist networks in the Greenlandic tourism sector, they are not policy networks and that the Greenlandic government's approach to developing this tourism policy has been top-down, reflecting a 'government' rather than a 'governance' approach. Barriers to the formation of policy networks included lack of a shared image for the future; lack of trust among actors; lack of time and spatial fragmentation hindering iterative interactions, and lack of institutional enabling of information and knowledge sharing.
Modern society has developed a growing dependence on electricity in order to carry out important societal functions. This implies the risk of cascading failures to society in the case of power shortage. The creation of a resilient and sustainable power energy system is therefore crucial. Equal crucial is the preparedness for the event of power shortage. As a part of the Swedish crisis management system, the Swedish Energy Agency (EM) has developed a planning system, STYREL, to identify social important objects in order to ensure important social functions in the case of power shortage. This article examines STYREL as a policy network and as a planning system to ensure a sustainable and resilient power supply. The study focus on the design of the system, the implementation of the system based on the results from the two rounds completed in 2010 and 2014. Using interviews with coordinators at the local and regional level in three counties and a survey including all 21 coordinators at the regional level, it indicates that the design of the planning system reviles opportunities for improvements of the planning system. The study also indicates that the coordinators at the local level lack trust in the planning system depending on both the lack of resource and the lack of feedback. This in turn indicates challenges for the system from a resilient and sustainability point of view.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.