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Lena Sommestad

Swedish politician and professor

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ537342 ↗
Source-derived summary

Lena Sommestad (born 3 April 1957) is a Swedish Social Democratic politician and economic historian. She was Minister for the Environment in the Ministry of Sustainable Development in the Cabinet of Göran Persson from 2002 to 2006.

Sommestad studied social sciences at Uppsala University and received a PhD degree in 1992. In the Fall of 1994, Sommestad was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden. From 1998 to 2002 she was the managing director of the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies (Institutet för framtidsstudier). She had not held a politically elected office before Prime Minister Göran Persson made her Minister for the Environment in October 2002.

Between April 2014 and March 2020, she was County Governor of Halland.

Selected bibliography

"Sågverksarbetarna i strukturomvandlingen: hur arbetsstyrkan vid Söderhamns och Söderalas exportsågverk förändrades till storlek och sammansättning under mellankrigstiden" - 1983.

"Från mejerska till mejerist: en studie av mejeriyrkets maskuliniseringsprocess" - 1992.

"Rethinking gender and work: rural women in the Western world" - 1995 Gender & Society no.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Lena Sommestad” as swedish politician and professor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lena, Sommestad and Swedish.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1957, 2002, 2006, 1992—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1957-04-03. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Lena, Sommestad and Swedish providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Lena Sommestad”, the useful work is to connect “swedish politician and professor” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q537342. VIAF identifies the subject as 85145911106327060953. The Library of Congress control number is n93043906. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 2002, 2006 and 1992.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lena Sommestad”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lena Sommestad primary sources, Lena Sommestad archive and Lena research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Lena Sommestad”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Lena Sommestad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.