The aim of this chapter is to examine the conditions for the practice of critical journalism in Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, during the Covid-19 pandemic. We focus on two aspects, one practical and one discursive. First, we focus on journalists’ access to relevant information about the pandemic, as access plays a key role in the practice of critical reporting. Second, we focus on metajournalistic discourse, understood as how public debate about ­journalism shapes the practice of journalism. We found that information access was challenged in all three countries, but in different ways. We also found elements of a metajournalistic discourse. In Denmark, this discourse expressed concern about journalism being too critical, while in Sweden and Iceland, the concern was more a lack of critical reporting. We argue that the differences found can best be explained by the different Covid-19 communication strategies in the three countries.

How issues are framed in journalism in terms of problems, solutions, and levels of responsibility is of great importance in order to engage and lead toward individual and collective action. Data journalism has been acknowledged as a practice that often features a high level of interactivity, with the potential to engage the public. In this study, we investigate the content and production of climate change reporting in Swedish public service data journalism and discuss how frames are used in this alternative form of moderated science communication. Our results indicate an unconventional merger between science communication and data journalistic practices where motivational framing is used only to some extent as a way to increase public engagement with climate change. We also found that producers focus on educating and raising awareness rather than engaging the public and that they are guided by the ideal of objectivity.

Over-fishing and eutrophication (too much nutrients) are among the most severe threats to the ecosystems of the Baltic Sea and the ecosystem services they provide. Despite the well-known fact that effective and sustainable management requires cooperation – among as well as within states – appropriate frameworks that work have not yet been constructed and successfully applied. This report summarises findings from a research project on cooperation for sustainable marine governance of the Baltic Sea carried out between 2013 and 2018. Three aspects of central relevance for the understanding of regional cooperation in environmental governance are distinguished: interests, knowledge and management. It is shown that it is not enough to design cooperative arrangements that make the group of users, stakeholders or states better off than without such an arrangement. It is furthermore required that all actors have individual interests to participate, and that free-riding on others’ contributions can be controlled. When this is not the case, effective abatement of eutrophication is not likely to be forthcoming, even though aggregated benefits from such measures are larger than expected costs.

Knowledge often play important roles in marine environmental governance, not least in relation to so-called epistemic communities, that is, groups of experts that share a common understanding of the environmental problem at hand, and how to address it. It is shown that the coherence of the epistemic group can be a crucial factor influencing its impact. In both abatement of eutrophication and management of fish stocks, these expert groups have been somewhat divided, which has limited their impact.

Modes of management can influence cooperation and outcomes in ways that can be difficult to predict. Although environmental taxes and subsidies are powerful policy instruments in contemporary governance, they must be carefully crafted to fit into exiting norms and contexts to be effective. It is shown that monetary incentives targeting farmers’ use of fertilisers tend not to be effective when they are at odds with deeply held norms on what constitute a “good farmer”. 

Detta kapitel fokuserar på frågan om hur stort förtroende människor har för forskning och forskare. Resultaten visar att svenska folkets förtroende för universitet och högskolor har legat stabilt på en hög nivå sedan mätningarna startades 1997. I årets undersökning är det 59 procent som har stort förtroende för lärosätena medan andelen med stort förtroende för hur forskare bedriver sitt arbete är 63 procent. Den faktor som har störst påverkan på graden av förtroende är utbildningsnivå. Högutbildade uppvisar det största förtroendet för såväl lärosäten som forskare. I kapitlet analyseras också svenska folkets vilja att satsa på forskning kopplat till ett antal samhällsutmaningar (till exempel hälsa, klimat, migration). Störst stöd har forskning inom området hälsa medan området migration och integration anses minst viktigt att satsa på. Liksom för förtroendet är även i denna fråga utbildningsnivå en förklaringsfaktor. Vi ser också tydliga samband med vilket parti man sympatiserar med.

Cooperation and communication play an important role for environmental governance. This holds true for the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, one of the most disturbed ecosystems in the world, where insufficient cooperation between different stakeholders is one reason for goal failure. This article addresses the linkages between (media) framing on the one hand, and cooperation on the other. The case in focus is a set of negotiations related to the Baltic Sea Action Plan, the most central governance strategy in the Baltic Sea region. Our results show that in order to influence political decision-making, key stakeholders compete over the power to define and interpret problems, causes and solutions to an extent impeding cooperation. We focus the analysis on eutrophication, which we show to be a complex and controversial topic, framed in incompatible ways by different stakeholders.

This chapter focuses on forms of and challenges for risk communication within regional environmental governance, based on an analysis of five environmental risks in the Baltic Sea – marine oil transportation, chemicals, overfishing, eutrophication and alien species. We address questions about how risks are framed and communicated and also analyse the role of communication in the governance process. Our main focus is on risk communication with the public (e.g. existing institutional arrangements and procedures of risk communication), but we also relate this analysis to discussions on communication with a broad range of actors and issues of stakeholder participation and communication. In the study we have identified some examples of relatively well-working risk communication with parts of the organised public in the Baltic Sea region (BSR), such as in fisheries or eutrophication, but also a number of different barriers and obstacles. Our key result from this study is that BSR consists of many national institutions for risk communication, but that there are hardly any centralised institutions for risk communication activities relating to environmental governance in the region. Another key conclusion is that public risk communication in this array of cross-national environmental risks is restricted mainly to (one-way) information. Against this backdrop and from our empirical and theoretical knowledge of risk communication and the role of the public, we finally suggest some ways for improvement.