Vem styr EU-projekten? : En kvalitativ studie om relationen mellan Malmö stad och externa aktörer i ett kommunalt EU projekt

Sammanfattning: In this thesis I study the relationship between Malmö Stad, a municipal government agency and external actors in a municipal based EU-project. The project in question is Food Loop System, a pilot project to the larger Cleantech TIPP project by Gate21, partially funded by the EU program Interreg ÖKS. The goal of this study is to establish whether the relationship between public and private or external actors in EU-projects can be considered democratic. Furthermore, the study seeks to bring in a new perspective on how projects can be considered democratic as previous studies have often focused on the relation between politics and public officials rather than external actors' influence on projects. In the thesis I do this by using Robert Dahl's ideal types for democracy and the use of a multilevel governance theory. Robert Dahl's theory is used to study the relationship between actors and the multilevel governance theory is used to establish if the project can be regarded as a type of multilevel governance and what effect that has on the democratic ideals. The study concludes that the relation between Malmö stad and external actors in the project Food Loop System can be considered democratic along with the project as a whole. Furthermore, the negative connotations of multilevel governance are not prevalent enough in the project as it fails to live up to most of the criteria required to be considered a type of multilevel governance, which means most criticism against multilevel governance can't be directed towards the project.