| dc.description.abstract | This master’s thesis is analyzing the uses of history in the political and administrative process to merge the municipalities of Søgne, Songdalen and Kristiansand in South of Norway. The Norwegian legislation gives the responsibility to coordinate and prepare the merge of municipalities to a joint political tribunal, and the survey is limited to the 22 meetings in the period from June 23th 2017 until September 24th 2019, where the joint political tribunal of the three municipalities had their debates and made their decisions. The main question that will be answered, is: What part did history play in this process of merging municipalities?
By examining available videotapes of the tribunal meetings and read the case papers produced by the administration, is narratives and references about the past being described, analyzed and categorized, both in perspective of the user and in reference to different theories regarding uses of history. The uses of history by local politicians are also compared to similar findings in governmental documents addressing the national reform of municipalities in Norway.
Overall, the members of the tribunal express a strong optimism and believe in the future. This high expectations for the future led to a demobilizing of the past and a non-use of the history. But the survey also shows that the politicians made a change in their orientation in time during the period of the tribunal, and became more concerned about qualities of the past in the second year. The marginalizing of history had some degree of orientational function, but it is not enough empirical evidences to claim that the tribunal developed a particular political history culture which made a significant impact on addressing political problems and how to solve them. The main reason to this lack of a working history culture lays in the rare institutional context of the joint political tribunal. | |
