This thesis addresses the relationship between civil society and the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) within the frame of the Nordic Vision 2030 to become “the most integrated and sustainable region of the world”. It reviews civil society's role in Vision 2030's social sustainability objectives by focusing on integration and social challenge response. As the analysis discovers a dynamic of interdependence between Civil society and the Nordic Council of Ministers, it observes how the NCM attempts to encourage Civil Society action by promoting shared values of a collective “Nordic Identity” and inviting them into policy conversation. The results are drawn qualitatively from policy papers and audio-visual panel discussions of the NCM and Civil Society by following a mixed method of thematic and content analysis. This study concludes that civil society is value-driven and eager to engage in social challenges and participate in policy changes. However, decisions on integration policies are a matter of nations, not the NCM, despite the Nordic Cooperation, which limits their agency to include civil society in policy work. This study contributes to the awareness of civil society being a source of empirical best practices, which has the potential to influence integration policies sustainably.

Diploma thesis "Nordic Cooperation. Its Transformation in the Second Half of the 20th Century and Its Current Shape" deals with the Nordic cooperation among Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden from the second half of the 20th century with the focus on the period from the 1990s till 2008. At the beginning, there is an introduction to the history of cooperation in Scandinavia till the 1990s and a description of two main institutions of the Nordic cooperation: the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The main chapter analyses the Nordic cooperation from the 1990s, it focuses on areas and intensity of the cooperation and describes concrete programmes, projects, institutions, targets and results of the cooperation. The thesis also deals with the question of the impact of the three Baltic States involvement in the Nordic cooperation in the 1990s. The answer is that the internal Nordic cooperation has been developing very intensively - it was demonstrated by the analysis of the Nordic cooperation in the 1990s in the main chapter - without any affecting of the Baltic States involvement in the main. On the contrary, the Baltic States involvement has brouhgt the external opportunity for the Nordic countries to integrate into the cooperation in the Baltic Sea region.