ON THE MANAGEMENT OF NITROGEN FLOWS: Towards a decentralisation of environmental management in Sweden?
During the past century human activides have at least doubled the rate ofnitrogen fixation in the global landbased nitrogen cycle. Besides being beneficial to human societal development, this has many deleterious consequences for the environment. As part ofthe responses to the call for world-wide acrion on the problems with nitrogen, this paper focuses on the Swedish situation – especially related to nitrogen pollution in coastal waters and other receiving waters – and discusses different srraregies for nkrogen pollution abatement; among them the recently proposed national sirategy. It is argued that a decentralised strategy, taking local and regional conditions for nitrogen pollution abaiement in consideration, is likely to be more efficient than a centralised one. Among other things, there has to be more room for municipalities to take acrion according to their specific conditions. Furthermore, il is argued that more effort has to be put on influencing food consumption and means oft ransportation. As a consequence, acrors in the environmental field will have to find themselves in new and different roles in future environmental management.