The concept of ecosystem services often is defined as a way where we as humans protect and preserve available ecosystems and at the same time can make use of these ecosystems for our own well-being. According to the UN report Millennium Ecosystem Assessment from 2005 the services can be classified into four categories: provisioning, regulating, cultural or supporting. This study is focusing on how Swedish municipalities are managing all of these services. The main aim was to examine if there is a difference among municipalities in general and between municipalities with a high and a low range of population density in particular. The reason for these potential differences was also discussed by interviews with representatives for a number of selected municipalities, complemented by studies of literature, this study showed that there are differences between Sweden’s more populated and less populated municipalities. Typically, the main difference was found in the area of the knowledge and the use of the concept in daily planning. Some municipalities seems to be almost unaware of that they partly already are planning for the maintenance of these services. In conclusion, there is still more work to do fully make use of the ecosystem service concept in planning to create a more resilient society, not least for the municipalities on the country side!

This essay examines the indirect effects of the local strength of the Swedish Democrats on refugee acceptance in the Swedish municipalities. With statistical methods this essay has aimed to investigate if such effects exist and by using statistical data from three periods of time - 2002, 2006 and 2010 – the investigation has been able to measure effects over time. Based on former research and reasonable expectations the hypothesis for the essay claims that the Swedish Democrats has got an indirect effect upon the refugee acceptance. With the statistical analyses made, the essay is able to conclude that the strength of the Swedish Democrats in municipality elections as well as the change of this strength between the elections does have a negative effect upon refugee acceptance in the Swedish municipalities. With this conclusion, the idea of the Swedish Democrats as an isolated and insignificant party is questioned.

Swedish municipalities have very different age structures. Migration from rural to urban areas has led to a polarisation of Swedish regions, where urban centres have an inflow of young and skilled workers while rural regions are ageing and falling behind economically. This thesis examines what effect population ageing has on output of Swedish municipalities and how that effect differs between urban and rural municipalities. By classifying all 290 municipalities as either rural or urban and dividing the population of each municipality into six age cohorts, a clear negative relation is found between the share of people aged 65 to 79 and gross regional product per capita in both types of municipalities. Surprisingly, this negative relation is not found for the share of people above 80. This group is positively related to output in urban municipalities, but not in rural ones. Overall, population ageing seems to be negative for economic growth in both urban and rural municipalities.

The digitalisation has moved forward since the first website launched in Sweden 1993. Today theinternet is a big source for information that is available 24/7 to the users. All municipalities inSweden have their own websites with information for its citizens about topics like eldercare,schools, and landscape planning to rescue services. 17 out of 290 municipalities had a chatbot atthe beginning of this study. The purpose of this report is to highlight how chatbots within theSwedish municipalities are used and what problems they can face with owning one. This will befrom the perspective of the municipality. The method used is semi structured interviews withrepresentatives from eight municipalities and the developer of a chatbot. From these interviews,and our own study, it was learned that municipalities need to prepare themselves better andunderstand their own requirements while measuring their expectations to those.

Sweden is divided into 290 municipalities. The municipalities are responsible for many services that generates significant amount of CO2 emissions. For example; energy, waste management andstreetlights. This emission can potentially be reduced by using Green IT - smart IT solutions that optimise the processes or reduces the energy needed. One good example is adaptive street lighting that utilize sensors to identify when someone is nearby and light needs to be on. The utilization of Green IT differs a lot between the municipalities. Why is this the case? Municipalities are not competing with each other, and it seems like low hanging fruit to just “copypaste” a successful Green IT solution from one municipality to another. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanism around diffusion of Green IT innovations related to Swedish municipalities. We applied a mixed method approach based on interviews and a questionnaire. Managers within the municipalities served as the source of empirical data. We found that there are several different types of factors that probably has an impact on the diffusion of Green IT innovation within municipalities and we investigated their relative importance. A high-level explanation of what factors that are considered to enable the diffusion of Green IT innovation is: Firstly, there need to be a willingness to change, for example by applying a policy or target settings. Secondly, superior Green IT solutions need to be identified and here the best forum is networking with other municipalities. Then innovation needs to be transformed to fit the specific municipality, which calls for the organisation’s own innovation capabilities. To finally implement the Green IT solutions there need to be available resources within IT and change management skills to successfully implement them. This study was made with mixed method approach based on a relatively small dataset and without measuring the actual rate of diffusion. The recommendation for future research is to further develop and validate our construct by testing the correlation between the factors identified in this study and the actual rate of diffusion of Green IT innovations within Swedish municipalities.

<p>The New Public Management (NPM) has made the public sector go through a period of privatization and externalization which has affected the method of accounting of municipalities, from cash to accrual accounting. The NPM has also resulted in a mix of private and public sector that makes the matter of consolidation of municipal groups complicated because of the municipalities’ use of public sector accounting and the municipal companies’ use of private sector accounting.</p><p> </p><p>In Sweden, the Swedish Council of Municipal Accounting (SCMA) has the task of producing recommendations concerning the accounting of municipalities so that the goal of the “true and fair” view of the municipalities’ is met. In 2009, the SCMA produced the recommendation 8.2 (RKR 8.2) containing guidelines concerning consolidation of the municipal group. The purpose of this article is to investigate the use of RKR 8.2 and what kind of municipality is more inclined to use the recommendation. This question shall be answered by a quantitative, document study of the annual reports of Swedish municipalities from 2009 together with the Stakeholder Theory and the Positive Accounting Theory.</p><p> </p><p>The result of the article shows that the municipalities that are more inclined to implement the RKR 8.2 and to implement it to a larger degree are municipalities of a larger size, with a high performance, with a high tax income and with large municipal companies.</p><p> </p><p>Still, the document study shows that only 43 out of 239 municipalities have implemented the recommendation. To increase the implementation and use of the recommendations of SCMA we suggest merger of municipalities as larger municipalities, for different reasons, have implemented the recommendation to a larger degree than smaller ones.</p>

The New Public Management (NPM) has made the public sector go through a period of privatization and externalization which has affected the method of accounting of municipalities, from cash to accrual accounting. The NPM has also resulted in a mix of private and public sector that makes the matter of consolidation of municipal groups complicated because of the municipalities’ use of public sector accounting and the municipal companies’ use of private sector accounting.   In Sweden, the Swedish Council of Municipal Accounting (SCMA) has the task of producing recommendations concerning the accounting of municipalities so that the goal of the “true and fair” view of the municipalities’ is met. In 2009, the SCMA produced the recommendation 8.2 (RKR 8.2) containing guidelines concerning consolidation of the municipal group. The purpose of this article is to investigate the use of RKR 8.2 and what kind of municipality is more inclined to use the recommendation. This question shall be answered by a quantitative, document study of the annual reports of Swedish municipalities from 2009 together with the Stakeholder Theory and the Positive Accounting Theory.   The result of the article shows that the municipalities that are more inclined to implement the RKR 8.2 and to implement it to a larger degree are municipalities of a larger size, with a high performance, with a high tax income and with large municipal companies.   Still, the document study shows that only 43 out of 239 municipalities have implemented the recommendation. To increase the implementation and use of the recommendations of SCMA we suggest merger of municipalities as larger municipalities, for different reasons, have implemented the recommendation to a larger degree than smaller ones.

Vattnet är en livsviktig resurs för levande organismer och ekosystem. Idag används vatten i alla möjliga sammanhang vilket har lett tillatt vattnet har blivit övergött och förorenat. Utsläpp av näringsämnen i för stora mängder anses vara den största orsaken til lövergödning och detta gäller framför allt utsläpp av avloppsvatten. Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka Sveriges kommunerskartläggningsstrategier för enskilda avlopp och vilka åtgärder de vidtar, samt hur många enskilda avlopp det finns. För att ta reda pådetta skickades en enkät och ett följebrev ut till alla kommuner i Sverige och sedan sammanställdes dessa. Av Sveriges 290 kommunervar det 232 som deltog. De vanligaste strategierna för att kartlägga enskilda avlopp är att skicka ut enkäter eller göra inventeringar. I många fall används bådastrategierna med enkät som ett första steg och inventering som ett andra. Resultatet av enkäten visar att mellan 50-90 % av de enskildaavloppen är undermåliga eller bristfälliga och att åtgärder krävs. Kommunerna ställer krav på fastighetsägarna att åtgärda sina avloppinom en viss tidsram annars kan förbud att använda avloppen utfärdas. Undersökningen visade att det finns ungefär 813 000 enskilda avloppsanläggningar i Sverige, vilket är en ökning med cirka 71 000 sedan2006. Ökningen kan bero på att fler än hälften av Sveriges kommuner har gjort en kartläggning sedan 2006

The aim of this thesis is to see if the elected auditors in the Swedish municipalities focus more on financial or on performance auditing in the audit report. This is a very important question today in the public sector because of the change in the elected auditor’s duties and responsibility. The public organizations management and accounting today are influenced by the private sector; therefore there must be a change in the elected auditor’s role in the public organization. The investigation was done by going through the audit reports of the municipalities of Sweden. The factors looked at were connected to both financial auditing and performance auditing and public management and accounting. Besides looking for factors, the number of words connected to each factor was counted. Since we only received audit reports from 232 out of 290 municipalities, our result is a little skewed representing the larger municipalities.The results from this study is that there is significantly more information concerning financial auditing rather than performance auditing in the audit report in the municipalities of Sweden. Also the political majority has no effect on the content of the audit report, nor do the political parties affect the amount of information concerning financial or performance auditing. The study also shows that the use of professional auditors in the municipalities can affect the content of the audit reports, both when it comes to financial and performance auditing.

In the European Union 500 million tonnes of waste are either incinerated without energy recovery,or deposited in landfills, which could have been recycled instead. The European Union initiated theCircular Economy Package in order to decrease the amount of waste being generated, lost inlandfills, and to increase the recycling and usage of recycled material. However, the CircularEconomy Package did not contain any targets focusing on energy recovery, and only mentionedenergy recovery as having a role in decreasing the amount of waste deposited in landfills. TheCircular Economy Package was in the end of 2014 withdrawn but will come back with moreambitious targets. In Sweden energy recovery is treating more than 50% of the municipal waste andwould then be affected by the targets of the Circular Economy Package when it comes back.This thesis focuses on Linköping and Norrköping to identify the what role energy recovery have inthese municipalities, both present and future, as well as asking the questions of how waste is valuedas a resource.The results were that both municipalities thought that it was important to have separate sorting ofmunicipal waste, to separate organic waste from the rest, in order to use it in material recycling andthe rest in energy recovery. In both municipalities the energy recovery had the role of treating themunicipal waste which was found to be not recyclable, as well as to deliver heat and electricity. Allof the organisations were identified to have a high environmental value on waste, but the economicvalue of waste were low or negative. The municipalities also knew little of the Circular EconomyPackage, but were aware of it, while the energy companies knew a little more of it, but still littlecompared to their national interest organisations Avfall Sverige and Svensk Fjärrvärme. All of theorganisations had identified similar challenges such as increased focus on recycling, minimisationof waste, but also a focus on decreasing amount of hazardous substances in products in order todecrease the amount of waste which needed to be deposited in landfills.