In the early spring of this year three students from the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University, working with Nordregio Senior Research Fellow Richard Langlais, conducted a telephone-based survey on Swedish municipal climate change-related work, with a response ratio of 100 percent. A full presentation of this study will soon be available in the form of a Working Paper produced by Nordregio.
The study is the first step in a larger project designed to understand municipal response on the climate change issue. The purpose of this phase of the study was to identify those municipalities with the highest levels of activity and to ascertain how concrete their work is. The person in charge of climate change issue-related work in each municipality was sought in order to ask a few basic questions regarding their work.
The survey is based on the methodology of Grounded Theory. As such, the goal has been, as far as possible, to minimize the impact of the researchers' own preconceived notions. While conducting the interviews, a so called "citizens perspective" was adopted, in other words what would happen if a regular citizen was to call the switchboard and ask for the person in charge of climate change-related issues? Since we were determined to get a response from all municipalities, we made more than one thousand telephone calls. This has resulted in a total response ratio of 100 percent, which in this context must be considered somewhat unique.
In our efforts to reach the correct person to interview we were connected to a variety of different people. This underscores the existence of an important characteristic, namely that a specific person in charge of climate change-related issues only existed in a handful of municipalities. In some municipalities we ended up interviewing janitors in charge of indoor climate-control working for the municipality and in one case a person working in a greenhouse growing vegetables for local schools. Although in most cases the person we ended up interviewing was either an Agenda 21 coordinator or an Environmental controller.