Characteristics and issues of support system in northern Europe are considered through analysis of material, questionnaire survey results and interview. As a result, three models are showed. The first model is role-sharing in Denmark: schools support students on one side, and municipality’s support for parents of students on the other side. The second model is resource coordination in Norway and Sweden: they coordinate support according to student’s needs. The third model is inclusive education in Finland: they have inclusive support at school. Though characteristics are vary more or less, support system for students by specialists’ responsibility and their networking in northern Europe. This is a future task to suggest a new support system that is practical and beneficent for school-age children in Japan.

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Danish child day-care institutions have to set the user boards mandatorily as well as in the other various institutions and social services. Parents have become a powerful influence on child day-care services. This article analyzes how the parents have gotten their power in child day-care services, and examines how parents' participation is secured. According to the case of A kommune, parents are involved in the operation of child day-care services by the different channels in the public institutions and the private ones. It found out that at the private day-care institutions the parents' boards become the direct administrator who plays the budget and the personnel affairs. The ways greatly differs between public and private day-care institution. It has been shown that parents get to be a prominent part through the historical development of day-care services.

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In recent years, the Icelandic Pirate Party-established in 2012-has been winning wide public support in the Icelandic political arena. This paper examines why the party emerged in Iceland despite the country’s stable four-party system. We conclude that the Icelandic Pirate Party has emerged as a response to the closed political decision-making process that has been a feature of Iceland thus far. The closed political decision-making process, which is at the core of traditional Icelandic and neoliberal politics since 1990s, led the country to an economic crisis in 2008,whichhad a major impact on the lives of local citizens. The majority of the citizens are against Iceland’s insular politics, and therefore were drawn to support the Icelandic Pirate Party, which aims at including citizens in the political decision making-process by utilizing their ICT (Information and Communication Technology) system.

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This research seeks to analyze the historical background of the radioactive waste policy formation in Finland based on a comparison with Germany. Within Högselius (2009)’s five broad explanatory factors which are identified in relation to the observed differences in spent nuclear fuel (SNF) policy outcomes around the world, military ambitions and non-proliferation, political culture and civil society, and energy policy are discussed in this research note. Both countries do not have own nuclear weapons, but they were in the different context of the Cold War. Some German officials thought at some points that they needed nuclear weapons. Besides, these officials were argued extensively about the nuclear nonproliferation treaty; until 1989, they pursued reprocessing that could make nuclear armament possible. In Finland, the Nordic Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Agreement Initiative was proposed, and in around 1980, reprocessing was not pursued. In addition, Finland has nuclear plants introduced by the East and West, and the anti-nuclear movement was divided. Finland could decide the radioactive waste disposal site plan for the first time in history. One of the reasons for Finland’s decision can be said that in the context of the Cold War, a strong nationwide anti-nuclear movement was absent.

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Finland started export its education system actively since 2010. It has developed a unique status among the international education market which is dominated by native English or other major language countries. In this paper, I tried to identify its uniqueness and similarity with predominant trends using official governmental documents, other materials and result of interviews with experts. Finnish uniqueness comes from the nature of the export commodities such as establishing education entities with local clients and putting importance on education consulting. Finland has a high reputation of quality of education and competency of vocational education which makes it advantage for education export. They are established in the long-run of evolution and the development process of education and society. However, regarding the education export cases, it is on the same flow of two significant trends of cross-border education in 21st century; the shift from student mobility to program and provider mobility and the shift from aid to trade. Those shifts, as well as other education exporting countries, come from the global transformation and growing higher education demand in rapidly developing countries.

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