Digitalization is hitting the energy industry by empowering energy producers and retailers, butmore importantly it’s empowering the end customers and the energy producers and retailers areno longer in possession of all power. Due to digitalization, energy networks are beingmodernized and new emerging technologies called smart grids and smart meters have beenintroduced. Smart grids can automatically monitor energy flows and adjust to changes in energysupply and demand. Smart meters on the other hand empowers the consumers to adapt theirenergy usage in both time and volume to different energy prices throughout the day by costcuttingtheir energy.With empowered and conscious end-customers, electricity retailers will have to compete in newways or risk losing their business. There is a risk that the majority of the over 100 electricityretailers in Sweden will be wiped out with time if data and information is not leveraged to theend-customers. This is potentially also threatening the business of TSU as well as othercompanies providing IT solutions to the energy market.For long Tieto Smart Utility (TSU) has offered IT services for both electricity retailers anddistributors across the Nordics. In relation to recently developed solutions as well as theopportunities and challenges created by digitalization and disruptive technologies such as smartmeters, the Nordic countries are in the forefront. Hence, TSU sees a potential in increasing itspresence in Western Europe to provide services to the retailers and distributors. However, inorder to expand to Western European countries TSU seeks to have a greater marketunderstanding of the different markets, in terms of for example market size, market structure,regulations. The problem is to have a structured and comprehensive way to increase marketunderstanding when assessing new West European energy markets due to the major differencesin each country.This thesis therefore aims to develop a framework which enables IT solution providers toconduct a market opportunity analysis in order to increase market awareness and assess theopportunities and potential in Western European markets, influenced by the smart-meter roll outand thus facilitate strategic decisions.A framework has been developed on the foundation on existing frameworks and applied onTSU by conducting a case study on a market opportunity assessment tool for energy IT solutionproviders. The framework consists of three levels of analysis; European-, Country- andCustomer Level which intends to identify market opportunities and potential.This thesis provides a framework for companies who wants to assess market opportunities andfacilitates strategic decisions regarding the potential of entering the markets. The findings of thisthesis has shown that the market opportunities for TSU are the greatest in Germany especiallydue to the market magnitude as well as the status for the smart meter roll-out. Furthermore,since IT solution providers usually offers many different services and solutions, the findings canbe used in a larger extent in order to asses the potential depending on type service and solution.

Climate change not only corresponds to scientifically proven future implications, but also poses a politically relevant study of climate security analysis, affecting the study and practice of (international) politics in different ways. In the same vein, the EU as an international organization have been getting more involved in discussions of climate-related security risks, in which the European Commission (which represents the Union’s common interests) have been publishing a set of consecutive policy documents addressing the climate change since the early 2000’s. Accordingly, this thesis studies five big policy documents produced by the Commission addressing the climate change between 2007 and 2021 by conducting a Qualitative Content Analysis upon the discourses and conceptualizations used to inform how the issue is to be understood, while basing on the theoretical model developed by von Lucke  et al.’s (2014) that distinguishes levels of referent objects and risk-security approaches. In doing so, it finds that the Commission often draws indirect connections between the climate change and its social, political and economic implications to the EU at the territorial (and individual) level, while heavily employing risk-based approaches and promoting rather business-as-usual solutions.

The Baltic Sea is a brackish body of water in the heart of Europe, and within it lives a small whale: the Baltic Sea harbor porpoise. However, this animal is becoming increasingly more endangered. Due to various man-made threats, less than 500 animals remain in the sea. This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this issue with a political approach through discussing how the state of this animal reflects on the European Union. Furthermore, it investigates the European Commission's role and takes a closer look at EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 to detect potential greenwashing. Through the case study of the harbor porpoise, the central conflict between the European Union and the conservationists aiming to save the animal gets illuminated from different perspectives. The analysis makes use of European integration theory as well as a deconstructive approach, through which the study is able to detect that the issue largely stems from the respective member states. Moreover, it finds that the approaches of the European Commission and the conservationist align at the core principles. With the help of an interview conducted with a field expert, these points can be emphasized. Reflecting on the findings it can be concluded that essential regulations are finally being put into place, but there is still a long way to go to save the Baltic Sea harbor porpoise.

Disability Mainstreaming zielt (analog zu Gender Mainstreaming) darauf, Anliegen und Bedürfnisse der Personengruppe "Menschen mit Behinderung" nicht allein in den für diese Gruppe offensichtlich wichtigen Bereichen anzusprechen, sondern sie in allen gesellschaftspolitischen Handlungsebenen mitzudenken und dementsprechende Forderungen umzusetzen. Dabei wird ‚Behinderung‘ vorrangig als soziale Konstruktion interpretiert, die mit der Erfahrung von Diskriminierung und Exklusion einhergeht.

European Commission's Reform Proposal Concerning The Investment Dispute Settlement Mechanism: Comparative Analysis In November 2015, during negotiations with the USA about the investment chapter of TTIP, the European Commission presented US delegates with a text which significantly differs from the traditional model of ISDS. Commission's reform proposal is a reaction to the current criticism directed towards the legitimacy of investment arbitration and to the demands for its thorough reform or even removal from the TTIP draft text. The Commission introduced the proposal after the public consultation opened in connection with the criticism of ISDS attracted significant public interest. This thesis aims to analyze the Commission's proposal and determine whether the Commission has introduced a sound proposal which would be capable of replacing the traditional concept of ISDS. The thesis further examines whether there are smaller or larger differences between the Commission's proposal and traditional ISDS and whether the Commission could have taken a different approach to some issues. After the first chapter dedicated to the criticism of investment arbitration and the results of the public consultation, the thesis analyses the Commission's proposal. Most attention is given to its procedural aspects,...

After situating my interest in issues of women’s participation in technoscience, starting withmy experiences in the 1970s, this thesis turns to consider women’s visibility in more recenttechnoscience, in the light of European Commission figures indicating a slower progressionfor women into the more prestigious positions in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineeringand Mathematics) than the Commission had hoped.Two media case studies are presented focusing on the visibility of women in the EuropeanUnion (including the United Kingdom). One case study considers the media campaign whichinitiated the public promotion of a European Commission campaign to encourage women intoscience. The campaign-launch taster video was “Science it’s a girl thing! The other casestudy involved an analysis of media from a ‘Day in the technology news’ drawn from theBBC TechNews website on the 7th January 2018.The analysis of the social imaginary draws upon still images clipped from the short videoclips. The discussion is set within the context of the ‘woman question’ in science and ‘thescience question in feminism’ and both the notion of the gaze, and also Deleuzian notions offaceicity and affect. This analysis then reflects upon the research question: “Dorepresentation and visual modelling, visual encounters, or some less tangibleaffective factors, play a role in continuing an androcentric focus in science andtechnology, and how might this impact on the on-going exclusion or disincentivisingof technology and research careers for women, even if narratives havechanged and initiatives have tried to entice more women into STEM and research inthe UK and European Union?” Ultimately the underlying interest is “What can bedone about the woman question in science and technology in these areas if we are to try and redress the imbalance in women’s participation?”

The goal of the submitted thesis "Evolution of the audit profession" is to introduce the audit profession focused on the current situation of the audit market. The European Commission published a Green Paper "Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis" on the 13th of October 2010 seeking views on a range of issues related to the statutary audit. (the consultation closed on the 8th of December). The part of this work is the comparison of views of the group of respondents and the summary of all responses. It also mentions the current situation of this theme.

The Reconstruction of the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant in Prague constitutes a fundamental challenge for the Czech capital city of Prague. The existing wastewater treatment plant is obsolete and fails to comply with limits set forth by the Council Directive 91/271/EEC concerning urban waste-water treatment. Thus, it is necessary to build a new waterline and reconstruct the old one. As such a project would be financially demanding, its implementation is dependent upon a subsidy from the EU Operational Programme "Environment". There are also more variants of the reconstruction of the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant in Prague. In the thesis, the author compares the contemplated options of re-building and reconstruction of the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant in Prague. He also examines the influence of negotiations with European Commission representatives and of the amount of the subsidy upon the choice of the final option. A hypothesis of the study is that due to the subsidy policy creates pressure on the final form of the reconstruction of the Prague Central Wastewater Treatment Plant, which directly interact its economic efficiency.

<p>Combining insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and neo-Gramscian IPE theory, this paper puts forth a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective to analyse the discursive articulation of ‘European subjects’ in the context of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda modernisation strategy. It is suggested here that the transformation proposed in Lisbon to the new economic imaginary of the knowledge based economy (KBE), depends on ‘new subjects’ and thus new discursive constructions of identities to reflect the new economic and social formations it envisions. The citizenship discourses of two of the Lisbon Agenda’s main supporters, specifically European business lobbies (represented by the ERT and LCEC) and the EU Commission, are examined in order to explore the relationship between citizenship rights and responsibilities and the two main goals of the Agenda, namely economic competitiveness/growth and social inclusion/social welfare protection modernisation. The argument is made that the discursive articulation of a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ variant of citizenship, especially evident in the discourses of the EU’s business lobbies and the EU Commission since the ‘shift’ to jobs and growth in early 2005, represents an attempt to further the commodification of the EU polity, and as a result, subordinate the more social goals of the Lisbon Agenda to the perceived imperatives of economic growth and competition. The Lisbon Agenda does not therefore mark a dramatic ‘turning point’ in favour of a more ‘social Europe’ as was speculated early on, but instead works to consolidate the dominance of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ as the socio-economic governance model for the EU. The paper ends with a discussion of the possible counter-hegemonic movements challenging the orthodoxy of embedded neoliberalism and neoliberal communitarian conceptions of citizenship.</p>

The chief preoccupation of the dissertation revolves around the European Union's project of calling forth a collective sense of "European identity" amongst people in the Union. It focuses specifically on how the European Union's identity politics plays out once the ethnic minorities with immigrant background now living in the Union are brought into view. The main purpose can be described as twofold; involving, firstly, a mapping and examination of how the EU construes and defines the identity it seeks to mobilize, and, secondly, a thorough discussion of the types of consequences or implications that stem from this endeavour. In demonstrating the strong tendency on part of the EU to articulate a common identity for the Union in ethno-cultural terms — whereby the EU is conceived as primarily a cultural community whose members are said to share the same origin, cultural heritage, religion and history — the study goes to great length in discussing the excluding implications that an ethno-cultural identity politics gives rise to. The dissertation argues that such an ethno-cultural disposition partly must be seen in light of the European Union's gradual adjustment to a largely neoliberal order; an order which has worked restraining on the feasibility of a social and political articulation of identity and citizenship in the Union. An introductory chapter outlines the discourse theoretical approach which guides the analyses in five essays. The essays mainly explore how the European Union's discourse on identity manifests in various policy areas - immigration, citizenship and education - all of which in one way or another address the issues of culture, the multicultural society, ethnic exclusion, racism and the situation for ethnic minorities and migrants. The complex of problems concerning ethnic, cultural and social exclusion in today's European Union thus constitutes a central theme engaged with throughout the dissertation. / digitalisering@umu