Central to policies relating to risk governance at the regional and local levels is the interaction between the public and

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.

No abstract

No abstract