Chapter 11 widens the Nordic focus of the book with an analysis of Russian policy imageries regarding its northern areas and their change over time. The chapter highlights different roles and conceptions of the North in Russia over time, laying the foundation for comparison and contrast with the Nordic countries. The chapter also highlights the current potential for integrated understandings and an inclusion of considerations amongst actors in the Russian northern areas.

This article illustrates, through a combination of administrative and legal perspectives, how ambitions to centralise prioritisation decisions within a police organisation can be limited by the legal rules relating to crime investigations and public order policing. As a case study, we use the centralisation of the Swedish Police, a reform intending to reduce the previously far-reaching operational independence of regional police authorities in favour of a centralised and uniform single authority. Through this case study, we analyse the interaction between the legal and institutional frameworks of policing and prosecution, including positive obligations enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. We conclude that legal responsibilities affecting the Swedish Police may significantly limit the possibility for managers and officers to de-prioritise many cases and public order concerns, which, in turn, may limit the ability to divert resources to other—centrally prioritised—tasks. Failure to account for such limits may cause reform ambitions to collide with legal responsibilities in day-to-day operative policing. The results indicate that research into organisational reform and police prioritisation may benefit from a more systemic analysis of the legal and institutional factors limiting institutional discretion.

Chapter 12 places the development of northernmost Europe into a context of global change. It discusses the extent to which global shifts in resource markets, geopolitical reasoning and situations, and climate change may influence the region. Drawing on local scenario workshops, amongst other things, the chapter illustrates uncertainties about potential futures even in development paths where future change can largely be seen as related to established and relatively enduring features of the present system.

Starting from metropolitan governance theory, this article explores and discusses place-specific institutional preferences among Swedish citizens with regard to city-regional governance. City-regional tendencies in the Swedish political context are described and, specifically, survey data from the Umeå and Göteborg areas in Sweden are utilized in two ways. First, three ideal-typical governance categories are conceptualized drawing on empirical patterns in the survey material. Preferences for the three emergent categories Status Quo, Regionalization, and Consolidation are then tested against independent variables measuring personal resources, sense of place, mobility, political view, and city-regional context. By way of multiple regression analysis, the article concludes with a discussion about some expected and unexpected results. In the final analysis, individual preferences for the three different models of city-regional governance seem to be influenced first and foremost by level of education and sense of place and whether or not the individual resides in a municipality which belongs to the core or to the periphery of the area.

There is an increasing emphasis on the diversity of disaster volunteering among disaster researchers. Our aim was to review the extent to which, and in what forms, emergent groups in the aftermath of natural disasters are examined as a topic of research. We review previous crisis and disaster management research, focusing particularly on those parts of the disaster research literature which treat with volunteerism. We describe and discuss how this research has evolved 1960–2016, and analyse how different forms of volunteerism, particularly emergent groups, have been researched following nine natural disasters. We utilize the Disaster Research Center typology to systematize and categorize research from different disaster contexts. The review shows that research on disaster management is fraught with an understanding of organization in disaster contexts based on the primacy of established formal organizations. We suggest a more fine-tuned conceptualization of disaster volunteerism and we call for further research on actor motivations.