Finnish administrative area (FFO) as the key to successful work with Sweden finnish adolescents

Sweden is home to five recognized national minorities, namely the Jews, the Roma, the Torne Valley Descendants (Tornedalians), the Swedish Finns, and the Sami population which also are an indigenous group. The Government`s Minority Policy aims at protecting and supporting the national minorities and the historical minority languages (Yiddish, Romani chib, Sami, Finnish, Meänkieli). The policy also promotes the right of youth, belonging to national minority groups in order to develop and streng then their cultural identity. This paper seeks to address the lack of involvement of Swedish Finnish youth in the so called Finnish Administrative Areas (Finskt förvaltningsområde, FFO), and how the Norrköping and Haninge municipalities tackle the issue. In this paper, a reconstruction of the intervention theory is presented with inspiration sought from the ideas of Evert Vedung, in order to see if the intentions of the legislation are implemented. In accordance to the research on how the policy is designed, the democratic theory, the theory of participation, as well as the theory of identity will be linked together to the opinions of officials. This will be done in accordance to the reconstructed intervention theory, which will be used as a tool in order to show how the selected mechanisms relate in order to describe how the policy will receive an expected result. The intervention theory is a method which is meant to be in use during the evaluation of measures done by the public organization. I have conducted audits on how each FFO approaches the problem at hand using municipality documents relating to the Swedish Finnish youth. In addition, I have interviewed municipal officials in the FFO:s of Norrköping and Haninge with the aim to get an impartial over view on how they are perceived by the Swedish Finnish youth within FFO. The result of my research indicates that local government activities in many cases can be linked to democracy theory, identity theory as well as participation theory. The mechanisms which were chosen used the recently named theories, are used to measure the municipalities offer of activities are language, interventions, activities and also the media. These theories have been used to select the mechanisms considered to be the most important deemed by the Law on the Protection of National Minorities (SFS 2009: 724[1]). [1] Lag (2009:724) om nationella minoriteter och minoritetssprå