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The aim of this thesis is to identify how a social citizenship for people with disabilities is shaped bythe normative structures in the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian law governing their right to transportin everyday life. The thesis deals with three types of transport provided by the public to private individuals: transport services, car allowances, and cash benefits for reimbursing transport costs forpeople with disabilities. For each provision, the focus of the study is directed by the followingquestions:

– Is there a rights/duties relationship between the public and the individual? Who is eligible forprovision? How does public funding impact entitlement? Who is obliged to provide? What are thelegal guarantees for entitlement?

Despite objectives within Nordic law and policy that people with disabilities should be compensated for their impairments, and allowed to lead independent and autonomous lives, the results from the thesis show that the various transport provisions do not fully realize this. The legal relations between the public and those with needs for transport in their everyday lives are characterized by control, scrutiny and questioning. In order to protect the public budgets from costs, the eligibility criteria in the law are so constructed as to ensure that only certain needs for transport, and only some impairments, can meet them. The national, regional and municipal governments, and the administrative courts, subject people with disabilities to intrusive inquiries regarding personal details and other circumstances in their lives, in order to be able to judge which needs for transport are to be considered legitimate and which are not.

The thesis shows that the individual rights to, especially, Swedish and Norwegian transport provisions are poorly protected against political decisions to cut funding. Local and regional self-governance isan interest that always competes with individual legal rights and make them weaker, irrespective of whether these rights can be appealed in administrative courts.

The conclusion in the thesis highlights how a social citizenship is shaped in the law governing the right to transport for people with disabilities, and that this social citizenship does not reinforce independence and individual autonomy for those who are dependent on the various provisions tomeet their needs for transport in their everyday lives.

This article focuses on power structures that define and conceptualize individuals with disabilities and their claims for transport services in Swedish welfare state law. In the Nordic countries people often expect the government to be both an important ally and a necessary tool for egalitarian emancipation. In many respects the Nordic welfare states are success stories where collective efforts have created a more egalitarian and economically prosperous society. Relative equality and emancipation are never static factors, however; every system creates new challenges and new injustices which add to the old. This article uses the right of people with disabilities to move about in society with the help of special transport services as an empirical example. The right to decide when and where to go where you want to go highlights immediate and important aspects of power relations. In the context of Swedish welfare state law this also creates an opportunity to show how law in the welfare state operates and how law constructs both people and their needs to fit into preconceived patterns of normality and citizenship in the Swedish welfare state. The terms redistribution and recognition are used to illustrate different aspects of social justice. Misrecognition can be understood as a status in society where cultural patterns systematically subordinate people, a situation experienced by many persons with disabilities. At the core of recognition lies parity of participation on equal terms with everybody else. The conclusion of the article is that the law on special transport services is quite capable of reaffirming social justice viewed as redistribution. However, when social justice is viewed as recognition people’s lack of power over daily life decisions makes the law quite oppressive.