Mid Sweden University

Rural areas face unique challenges in organizing effective disaster management, shaped by factors such as vast geographical areas, demographic decline, and limited local resources. This study seeks to provide a detailed understanding of the specific conditions that influence rural disaster management, and to uncover the local strategies and practices used to address these conditions. By exploring the structural and practical aspects of disaster management in rural municipalities, the study sheds light on how contextual factors influence disaster management initiatives and how state regulations intersect with local resources and demands. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with public officials engaged in disaster management in rural northern Sweden, the research identifies three key challenges facing these municipalities: formal demands; geographical constraints; and resource limitations. Additionally, it highlights five innovative strategies employed to address these challenges: dual roles; informal working methods; collaborative work; skilled personnel; and organizational spirit. The study highlights the disparities between available resources and competencies, as well as the complexities of governing vast geographical areas while upholding equal statutory duties as the rest of the country. Ultimately, the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of disaster management in rural settings and underscore the importance of tailored approaches to address the unique needs of these communities.

Research in disaster management (DM) has long emphasized the challenges encountered by DM professionals, including the role of disaster planning, the influence of material and financial resources in shaping DM, and the significance of collaboration and interorganizational networks in enabling effective coordination, information sharing, and joint problem-solving across institutional boundaries. Despite these valuable insights, we argue that one crucial dimension remains underexplored: temporality. Temporality, here understood in a more processual way enables an analysis of how temporal framings shape how DM is conceptualised, negotiated, and transformed over time in local crisis governance. Our approach treats temporality not as a neutral backdrop against which crises unfold but as an analytical lens for understanding how past events are reinterpreted, how present conditions are made sense of, and how futures are imagined in DM and civil defence contexts. By analysing interviews with 16 DM professionals in local governmental agencies in northern Sweden, we identify how professionals both navigate forward and backwards in their understanding of what actions and measures should be taken in the present. 

Research in disaster management (DM) has long emphasized the challenges encountered by DM professionals, including the role of disaster planning, the influence of material and financial resources in shaping DM, and the significance of collaboration and interorganizational networks in enabling effective coordination, information sharing, and joint problem-solving across institutional boundaries. Despite these valuable insights, we argue that one crucial dimension remains underexplored: temporality. Temporality, here understood in a more processual way enables an analysis of how temporal framings shape how DM is conceptualised, negotiated, and transformed over time in local crisis governance. Our approach treats temporality not as a neutral backdrop against which crises unfold but as an analytical lens for understanding how past events are reinterpreted, how present conditions are made sense of, and how futures are imagined in DM and civil defence contexts. By analysing interviews with 16 DM professionals in local governmental agencies in northern Sweden, we identify how professionals both navigate forward and backwards in their understanding of what actions and measures should be taken in the present. 

Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet (SLU) och Institutionen för stad och land, har sedan 2019 i uppdrag av regeringen att arbeta för att stärka forskningen kring Sveriges landsbygder genom förbättrad samordning och samverkan mellan de aktörer som bedriver forskning inom landsbygds- och regional utveckling i Sverige. Uppdraget går under namnet Uppdrag landsbygd och syftar till att stärka upptagningen och tillämpningen av kunskaper om landsbygdsutveckling, och stödja spridning av den kunskap om landsbygder som forskningen utvecklar.

Inom ramen för Uppdrag landsbygd har SLU anlitat forskare vid Mittuniversitetet (Linda Kvarnlöf och Sophie Kolmodin) och Umeå Universitet (Veronica Strandh) för att utreda följande frågor om beredskap i svenska landsbygder:

1.Hur påverkas landsbygder i olika delar av landet av kriser och nya utmaningar?

2.Vad kan göra landsbygderna mer robusta i ett sådant perspektiv?

3.Hur kan landsbygdernas roll för hela landets beredskap tydliggöras och stärkas?

I följande rapport sammanfattas arbetet med denna utredning. I slutet av rapporten ges även ett antal rekommendationer, med syfte att ytterligare stärka svenska landsbygders beredskap. Rapportens innehåll grundar sig främst i en genomgång av tidigare forskning, och en redovisning av empiriska exempel som vi bekantat oss med genom vår egen forskning. Rapportens rekommendationer har tagits fram i dialog med representanter från myndigheter, regioner, kommuner, civilsamhällesorganisationer, näringsliv och universitet.

In recent years, the Students Barents Rescue (SBR), a student-focused spin-off of the Barents Rescue, has been implemented at universities in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. This exercise is specifically designed for students enrolled in programs related to risk and crisis management studies. Barents Rescue itself is a civil international crisis management exercise aimed at developing the capacity for cross-border collaboration in response to disasters, accidents, and other emergencies in the Barents region. Through table-top emergency scenarios, the exercise fosters cooperation between participants from different countries and disciplines, emphasizing the importance of coordinated crisis management in a region where cross-border cooperation is essential.

The SBR exercise is designed to engage university students in a hands-on, collaborative environment where they can experience first-hand the complexities of cross-country cooperation during times of crisis. SBR provides a unique opportunity to develop essential skills in communication, teamwork, and crisis management, while also gaining a deeper understanding of how national and cultural differences can influence decision-making in a collaborative setting.

We argue that exercises like SBR can improve students' learning and understanding of cross-country collaboration. While we will touch on the exercise’s aims and learning objectives, the focus will be on student evaluations, which provide valuable insights into how participants perceive the exercise's effectiveness. In addition, we will examine how the development of case scenarios within the exercise has evolved over the years. These case scenarios are an essential component of the exercise, providing students with realistic, real-world situations to respond to, further enhancing the learning experience and preparing them for future roles in crisis management.

Collaboration plays a vital role in addressing complex problems across multiple domains of life – whether in private households, professional environments, or broader societal contexts. At a societal level, collaboration is often necessary to solve critical and complex tasks invarious contexts, across which it is fundamentally relational. In otherwords, collaboration does not occur in a vacuum but rather is conditioned by temporal and spatial conditions and social relations, which together influence how it takes form and unfolds. Despite the importance of these contextual aspects, research on collaboration within civil society has often paid limited analytical attention to how temporality, spatiality and social relations shape collaborative practices. This thesis seeks to address this gap by exploring collaboration among civil society actors through a relational lens, witha particular focus on the dynamics in the setting of refugee support and forest fires at the local level. It consists of four individual papers (Papers I–IV), each of which applies a relational perspective to examine how social relations, temporality and spatiality interact to influence the formation, development and sustainability of collaboration within  civil society. The first paper lays the foundation by exploring how locally based civil society organisations (CSOs) in Malmö responded to the refugee situation of 2015–2016. Using interviews with CSOs and combining a framework for organisational drivers of collaboration with relational sociology, it shows that collaboration is not only activated by external needs but is also deeply conditioned by preexisting relations. It highlights how collaboration functions both as a response to crisis and as a trust-building process that sustains organisational resilience. This paper establishes the importance of relational interdependencies in urban contexts and introduces temporality as a key dimension, especially as CSOs anticipate future scenarios in shaping their current actions. Building on this, Paper II examines a more formalised platform for collaboration – theMalmöandan local compact – through the lens of a collaborative governance framework. In addition to interviews, it includes policy documents related to the Malmöandan, making temporality more explicitly central, as the paper investigates how CSOs’ engagement with the compact is shaped by their perceptions of future roles and risks. The study reveals that while some CSOs see the Malmöandan as a pathway to deeper collaboration with local government, others perceive it as a potential threat to their autonomy, shaped by political ideologies and historical mistrust. Thus, this paper extends the temporal analysis of Paper I by showing how anticipated futures and ideological conditions shape collaborative willingness and withdrawal. The third paper shifts the empirical focus from an urban to a rural setting, exploring how informants in the northern inland area of Sweden discuss collaboration concerning refugee support. Using relational place theory and the concept of peripheralisation, it introduces the notion of place-specific collaboration to describe how rural civil society actors adapt to their unique challenges. While expanding the spatial scope of the thesis, this paper also reinforces the relational insights of Papers I and II by demonstrating how spatial configurations enable and constrain interactions and resource sharing across actors. Finally, the fourth paper integrates and extends the thesis’s analytical frame by focusing on volunteers and their experiences of voluntary action from a processual temporal perspective. Drawing on the notion of agency as temporally embedded, and informed by additional empirical material consisting of interviews from the 2018 forest fires in Gävleborg and Jämtland, this paper shows how volunteers navigate between past experiences, present conditions, and imagined futures. In doing so, it offers a more processual understanding of volunteerism that complements the other papers and underscores how temporal narratives are not only interpretive tools but also drivers of agency and collaboration. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that collaboration within civil society is relational and shaped by temporality and spatiality. Voluntary initiatives and collaborative practices are conditioned through interactions with other actors and events across time and space. Theoretically, by integrating insights from relational sociology, the thesis offers a dynamic understanding of how relationships emerge, evolve and influence collective action. Empirically, it contributes to research by examining both urban and rural settings and by including both formal organisations and individuals engaged in voluntary action outside organisational frameworks. Based on qualitative data, the findings underscore the interdependencies and contextual conditions that condition and shape how collaboration unfolds in practice.

Samarbete är avgörande för att hantera komplexa samhällsutmaningar, men påverkas alltid av tidsmässiga, rumsliga och relationella villkor. Trots detta beaktar forskningen om civilsamhället ofta i begränsad utsträckning hur dessa faktorer präglar praktiken. Denna avhandling undersöker samarbete mellan civilsamhällets aktörer ur ett relationellt perspektiv med särskilt fokus på lokala sammanhang. Avhandlingens syfte är övergripande att synliggöra hur sociala relationer samspelar med tid och rum för att forma både förutsättningar och dynamik i samarbetsprocesser. Genom att förena dessa perspektiv visar avhandlingen hur samarbeten etableras, utvecklas och förändras över tid och plats. Sammantaget erbjuder avhandlingen en fördjupad förståelse av civilsamhällets kollektiva handlande som kontextbundet och relationellt förankrat. Denna insikt är central för att bättre kunna analysera samarbete i såväl vardagliga situationer som i kriser och framtida samhällsutmaningar.

This article emphasizes the significance of relational concepts in understanding Disaster Management (DM) in rural areas. Specifically, we turn to the concepts of relational place and peripheralization to illustrate how places derive meaning from their relationships with other places and argue for a deeper understanding of how these dynamics influence DM professionals’ experiences of their work and of peripheralization. Despite extensive research on DM, place is often treated as a neutral backdrop rather than as an active agent that shapes professionals’ work. To explore the role of place in DM, we draw on interviews with professionals from four municipalities in northern Sweden, characterized by expansive geographies, declining populations, and a decreasing tax base. By employing the concept of relational place, we show how DM professionals perceive laws and regulations as ill-adapted to their contexts and their work as diverging from broader societal norms. We also illustrate how feelings of peripheralization, understood as a process rather than a static condition, are linked to the political, financial, and social dimensions of DM. Through this article, we aim to broaden the discourse on DM by providing insights into the unique challenges faced in rural contexts, emphasizing how these intersect with professionals’ understandings of place.

This presentation highlights the importance of relational concepts for understanding disaster management (DM) in rural areas. Specifically, we turn to the concept of relational place to illustrate how places derive meaning from their relationships with other places and argue for a deeper understanding of how these dynamics influence DM professionals’ experiences. Despite extensive research on DM, place is often treated as a neutral backdrop rather than as an active agent that shapes professionals’ work. To explore the role of place in DM, we draw on interviews with professionals from four municipalities in northern Sweden, characterized by expansive geographies, declining populations, and a decreasing tax base. By employing the concept of relational place, we show how DM professionals perceive laws and regulations as ill-adapted to their contexts and their work as diverging from broader societal norms. We also illustrate how feelings of peripheralization, understood as a process rather than a static condition, are linked to the political, financial, and social dimensions of DM. Through this, we aim to broaden the discourse on DM by providing insights into the unique challenges faced in rural contexts, emphasizing how these intersect with professionals’ understandings of place.

Existing theories on collaboration within civil society frequently treat collaboration as detached from the specific geographical and social places where it occurs. In other words, collaborative theories tend to understate the significance of local context. Contributing to the discussion on rural civil society collaboration, this article explores how collaboration within civil society can be understood by adopting a relational perspective on place. Drawing on interviews with civil society actors, both those affiliated with an organisation and not, in northern rural Sweden—the most sparsely populated region in Europe—and using refugee reception as an empirical case, this article highlights how collaboration needs to be understood in relation to place, distance, and peripheralization.