Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This work deals with the communication in the Swedish EPA. The main issue is to understand how the work with communication functions within the EPA, in several ways, internally between the different stakeholders who deal with information in the EPA and externally, it means between the EPA and the councils and other external actors. The EPA, especially the department of wildlife management (the N-department) is involved in a process that tries to increase the dialogue between stakeholders and the cooperation. An example of this is that several of the workers in the department are participating in “Dialog
för Naturvården” (Dialogue for environmental protection). The department is in charge of organising the VIA-conference about wildlife management and species protection. The conference is an important thing for the department, and the goal is to make the different
councils and actors participate in the process and send the idea of dialogue, collaboration and cooperation.

Internally, the informants of the department feel left outside the process when they consider that their voices are not listened to by the Information secretariat. A lack of communication is the source of conflicts among the different levels of informants. In this work I analyse those two cases and relate them to environmental communication theory in matter of learning, perspective, conflict management and participation. Then we will see that it is possible to make the message of participation and dialogue even clearer in order to improve the cooperation in the administration. Case study number two is complex and needs to go deeper in the human being and the
symbolic interactionism theories to understand what is going on. Distrust? An escalating conflict? Or it is, maybe, the possibility of becoming stronger.