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Sustainable energy has been on the political agenda in Denmark for decades. This chapter will highlight how wind turbine production quite unforeseen became a great success in Denmark before the turn of the Millennium. An integrative public leadership approach using a mix of supportive institutional designs and instruments, combined with an unexpected bottom-up pressure for alternatives to nuclear power, promoted ways for wind turbine innovation and production in the 1970s. After the turn of the Millennium, being a huge financial success creating many new jobs and export has it developed into a cluster based on huge investments and professionalised developers. The comprehensive transition of wind turbine production in Denmark, from small scale to large scale, has however provided a counterproductive decrease in community commitment for local renewable energy production.

Denmark is known internationally as a climate frontrunner and not only due to wind turbine production and planning. The status is obtained by polycentric governance applied in cooperative-owned energy systems. The Danish response to climate change is a concerted effort of a plethora of public and private actors, providing a crucial momentum and robustness in climate politics not at least generated from a genuine civic society involvement. ‘The Danish Energy Model’; a withhold strategic effort to combine ambitious renewable energy goals, energy efficiency targets and political support of technical and industrial development has for four decades, succeeded in providing high levels of cheap energy supply, while partly reducing fossil fuel dependency at the same time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate regional variations in the international news coverage of climate change by comparing news reporting in two regional media systems.

A case study of how COP14 and a European union (EU) summit on climate change are covered by three Middle Eastern and one Danish newspaper.

The paper shows significant regional differences in the media coverage of climate change both in terms of quantity (numbers of news articles) and quality (editorial variations, sources, framing, use of graphics). Overall, the study suggests that regional differences in climate change coverage can be traced back to the financial resources, institutional practices and journalistic fields of different regional media systems.

The paper is a pilot project designed to test the analytical significance of regional variations in international media coverage of climate change.

Whereas global variations in climate change coverage have mostly been documented by (quantitative) content analysis, less research has been devoted to qualitative differences on how the media approach and frame climate change. Numerical analysis only tells half the story as qualitative differences, such as editorial priorities, or journalistic practices, can either increase or decrease the significance of quantitative variations. By acknowledging the importance of regional differences in international news reporting, this paper emphasises the role and function of regional media systems in conditioning media coverage of climate change.

The issue of climate change raises new requirements for the way our societies work. Even though climate policy is regarded as being crucial on the way to a low carbon society, the coordination of technology and climate policy proves difficult. The purpose of this paper is to look closer into the challenges and experiences related to the coordination between climate and technology policy in order to draw lessons for the future integration of both policy fields.

In this paper a case study approach is applied to the policy coordination efforts in two countries: Denmark and the UK. From a theoretical point the study is informed by the literature on the dimensions of policy learning and the findings of innovation and transition studies.

The case studies provide important lessons how important flexibility and continues policy learning and its institutionalization will be on the way towards a low carbon society. However, it becomes clear that the price of this flexibility is the risk of “symbolic action”, respectively, postponing emission reduction measures.

The findings are drawn from two countries, however it remains not fully clear in how far the instruments and approaches from countries like Denmark and the UK can be applied in a similar way in other countries.

The paper provides an important discussion of contradictions between climate and technology policy from the perspective of the literature in innovation studies and policy learning.

In this concluding chapter, the editors provide an overall assessment of contemporary Danish public governance based on the main findings in the preceding chapters of the edited volume. Surveying the Danish governance responses to contemporary mega-challenges, the chapter reflects on policy implications and contemplate the future of both research and practice related to public administration, politics and governance in Denmark. The chapter argues that recent public governance reforms have turned the Danish welfare state into a mix of a neo-Weberian state and an enabling state, which deploys its considerable resources to create economic growth for the benefit of the large majority of Danes, to satisfy the needs of citizens and businesses and to develop collaborative solutions to complex problems. While the chapter concludes that this modified version of the well-known universal welfare state is largely apt for meeting the mega-challenges of the twenty-first century, recent reforms seeking to enhance job-seeking incentives for the unemployed and to integrate immigrants have resulted in new forms of marginalisation of weaker societal groups. Moreover, evolving problems such as climate change, an ageing population and digital citizen privacy will require further public governance reforms in the years to come.

Being constantly exposed to emerging economic and environmental challenges and other external shocks, such as the recent pandemic, agrifood systems must be resilient and adaptive. The Danish AgriFood System (DAFS) adopted a number of organisational changes in response to environmental demands and external shocks, both in the sector and the management by public authorities, leading to the development of new strategies and instruments. The DAFS has demonstrated an ability to anticipate, to be proactive and to recover quickly from difficulties, exhibiting remarkable resilience and the capacity to adapt and to position itself as a frontrunner in sustainable agrifood. In this process, the organisational institutional settings play a prominent role, where public and private actors interact and coordinate their activities, develop synergies and resolve conflicts within collaborative governance structures. The DAFS provides four interlinked and equally important success stories worth emulating: governance, cooperation, professionalism and social capital. Governance structures incorporating the state-administration-agrifood sector in close collaboration provide the necessary institutional conditions for adaptation and the accommodation of new solutions to emerging problems. Integrated cooperative organisation ensures the fair distribution of the added value and enables the resolution of conflicts and consensus-driven decisions. High levels of expertise and professionalism support the sector to identify new strategies and viable innovative solutions in the long term, responding to new demands while remaining competitive by promoting and externalising sector interests. Strong social capital binds everything together and ensures sustainability and resilience.

In the twenty-first century, societies around the world are facing a wide range of daunting global mega-challenges: poverty, unemployment, income inequality, unequal distribution of political power, ageing populations, uncontrolled migration, segregated urbanisation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and a massive decrease in biodiversity. In recent years, politicians, journalists and academic observers have singled out the Nordic countries, Denmark in particular, as model societies of trusting and happy people that have handled many of these challenges with remarkable effectiveness. And yet others warn against ‘becoming Denmark,’ painting a picture of a dysfunctional, socialist nightmare with high taxes, low job motivation and a general lack of private initiative. In this introductory chapter, the editors cut through the noise of the international debate and set the scene for the nuanced analyses presented here of contemporary public governance in Demark and its capacity to tackle some of the most pressing problems of our time. Specifically, the chapter discusses various conceptualisations of the Danish welfare state, delineates some of its most important historical and structural traits and outlines the main empirical features of contemporary Danish public governance. Finally, it outlines the structure of the book and briefly introduces each of its subsequent chapters.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and theorise the links and possible dilemmas posed by the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition taking the case of Denmark as the point of departure.

The empirical observations in this paper consist of the political and discursive climate around legislation on ethnic minority matters, information from the Danish Statistical Bureau, the “Danish Level of Living Survey”, and the experiences from Danish urban districts which have a high concentration of immigrants.

Since the 1990s, the political discourse has changed with the emergence of right‐wing, anti‐immigration populism seriously affecting immigrants’ and refugees’ legal rights and their possibilities for socio‐cultural and socio‐economic inclusion. On the one hand, these changes have been driven by a strong “work first” discourse which has led to a reduction of the duration and level of social benefits, and increased poverty. On the other hand, other policy changes have been more inclusive examples being education policy, active labour market policy measures and innovative empowerment programmes in deprived urban districts.

Social innovation – here defined as the ability to organise bottom linked collective action/empowerment (including efficient political representation) – is a condition for reaching sustainable democratic and social development. But without more far‐reaching changes in the socio‐cultural and socio‐economic opportunity structures based on universal welfare principles and which also clearly address structural ethnic discrimination in all spheres of the social fabric, local empowerment and recognition strategies are likely to fail.

The paper addresses a crucial issue in the Danish and other European societies in relation to the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants. The value of the paper is that it integrates different theoretical approaches to inclusion and exclusion of immigrants and employs different empirical material (quantitative and qualitative) to both underpin, discuss and challenge these theoretical approaches.

Denmark’s apparent success at controlling corruption is likely both real and more complex than it may appear. This chapter reviews a series of hypotheses about the extent and sources of corruption control in Denmark, emphasizing both domestic and international factors. Some possible vulnerabilities are discussed, including whether Greenland – which is usually excluded from Danish governance ratings – might introduce corruption via its mining industries, and whether the growing wind-power industry (in some senses, another extractive enterprise) might also encourage corruption. A simple data analysis, using the Gothenburg University Quality of Government Impartiality Index, suggests that small social scale, a homogeneous population, competitive politics, and extensive international connectedness might well help check Danish corruption, but relationships among the variables are complex and marked by considerable simultaneity. Denmark illustrates two subtleties often overlooked: the importance of “soft controls” – social values, a working consensus, an emphasis on fairness, and common goals – for corruption control, and the question of whether advanced market societies really control corruption or merely reduce incentives to engage in it, as a result of business-friendly policies and institutions. A final issue involves dependent variables: better indirect measures of corruption might well be obtained by gathering and benchmarking indicators of government performance.

International migration is a global challenge affecting peoples and nations all over the world. In the advanced economies and welfare states of Western Europe, integrating migrants presents political, social as well as economic challenges. Over the past 50 years, Denmark has made a remarkable U-turn on the immigration question. Once the author of one of the most liberal immigration policies in Western Europe, Denmark presently has one of the strictest. This chapter addresses the causes behind the Danish policy U-turn, and how it has affected the social, economic and political integration of immigrants in Denmark. The chapter shows how Danish immigration politics have turned from low to high salience and have undergone radical changes resulting in a tightening of both internal and external immigration policies. It has become far more difficult to obtain residence and citizenship in Denmark. These measures have limited influx although international refugee crises are difficult to control at the borders. Moreover, Danish integration policies have focused increasingly on obligations and incentives, primarily by cutting benefits. The Danish case however shows that reduction of social benefits only has a marginal positive short-term effect on employment but with some negative side effects. When it comes to education, the Danish welfare state has been relatively successful in integrating immigrants and descendants in the educational system.