ABSTRACT
Individual responsibility for the environment was set in the Swedish political agenda in 1986. When summing up the political environmental talk in Parliament, Minister of Environment Ingvar Carlsson claimed that the government had done a lot, but still environmental problems occurred all the time, and in many situations the government was a step behind. It was like curing ‘gastric ulcer with plaster’ (Prot. 1985/86:72, p. 34. Notes from the debate in the Swedish Parliament, February 6, 1986, Stockholm). As a general trend, policy-making was characterized by the state taking responsibility for environmental effects by the use of instruments like law-making, planning, regulations, taxes, etc. According to Ulrich Beck, environmental policy developed according to ‘the empty slogan of an “ecological restructuring of industrial society” ’ (Beck, 1997, p. 7).
