Hållbara städer – bidrar IT? En undersökning huruvida kommuner använder IT för att uppnå en hållbar utveckling

Abstract

Environmental issues and sustainable development is a high priority in today’s society and has received substantial attention lately. In the inaugural speech it is expressed that the goal for the IT‐politics is a sustainable information society for everyone, which can be achieved by using IT to support sustainable growth. The Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications has developed a document which outlines three specific proposals on what the government should focus on during a three‐year period (2008‐2010) that with the use of IT will contribute to a sustainable society. These are: The public sector´s own use of IT, Intelligent transport systems and Sustainable cities. This study aims to identify how the public sector has worked to integrate IT in the business to achieve the goal on sustainable cities. The specific objective is to identify whether the municipalities IT‐strategies is supporting its objectives regarding sustainable development. This by the following main question; Does the municipality´s ITstrategy support the objectives of sustainable development? The study has been carried out as a qualitative case study in which I by analysis and interpretation of documents have sought answers to my questions. To make the result generalizable a number of random selected municipalities was selected and weighed against the core requirements that were set for the study. Furthermore, documents concerning the business strategy were gathered from the concerned municipality's website for analysis and interpretation. The result clearly shows that the IT and the sustainable development is not united in the analyzed municipalities. If the plan is to continue to work towards the vision of sustainable cities in 2010 there should be more focus on examining how IT can be used to contribute to sustainable development.