| Summary: | In a time where environmental consciousness has become a more pressing matter the public libraries have the opportunity to influence and inspire their communities to take a stand towards more environmentally sustainable communities. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to contribute to the discussion about the role of the public library in environmental issues and ecological sustainable development in relation to municipal government documents. Three municipalities with pronounced environmental focus were chosen, these are the municipality of Gävle, Helsingborg and Lund. The following questions were discussed: “What’s the role of three public libraries interms of ecological sustainability in relation to their respective municipalities' governing documents?” “What does the work involving ecological sustainability in the three municipalities' governing documents look like?” ”What does the three public libraries activities look like from an ecological sustainability perspective?”. The findings in this study were based on semi-structured interviews with informants from the public libraries in the chosen municipalities along with the municipal government documents. The material were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using Kathryn Millers concepts envionmental leader and environmental educator and Ali AlQahtany, Yacine Rezgui och Haijiang Li’s SUPD Model for a sustainable urban planning. The results show that the selected libraries to a large extent show signs that they work on the basis of municipal government documents. The study also shows that the libraries primarily take the role of environmental leaders, rather than educators. The SUPD Model was used to a large extent and correlated with the municipal documents.
|
|---|
