We Examined the Documents, and the Results Are Disappointing

The official material prepared for Sweden’s first citizenship test contains climate-policy passages that Goldmann says follow the Tidö parties’ rhetoric rather than existing climate legislation. In a reply published by Dagens Nyheter, the 2030 Secretariat representative challenges the University and Higher Education Council’s claim that the government did not influence the wording in detail.

Goldmann says he requested correspondence between the University and Higher Education Council, the Swedish National Agency for Education and the experts involved. His review, he writes, produced disappointing results. No climate specialists were engaged, while texts prepared by the education agency were sent to university experts in teaching methods who explicitly said they were not climate experts.

The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, which Goldmann identifies as sources of leading climate knowledge, were not consulted. He says educational experts actively requested that they be brought into the process.

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We have examined the documents, and the results are disappointing.

The correspondence also showed that university specialists proposed more than 200 changes to the climate and geography sections alone. Goldmann says officials ignored a large share of those suggestions, leaving factual errors and tendentious wording in place despite the warnings.

He links the issue to an earlier decision by Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg to refuse a government assignment to create the citizenship test in August 2025. The universities said the purpose was politically influenced. Goldmann argues that the correspondence indicates that the agencies adopted wording resembling the government’s language even without formal instructions to do so, raising questions about how public agencies can preserve their independence.

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No climate expertise was engaged.