Matkailun kestävämpi kehittäminen edellyttää paikallisyhteisön näkökulmien huomioimista. Silti paikalliset tarpeet ja ideat saattavat jäädä huomiotta matkailun kehittämisprosesseissa. Tällöin kehityksestä tulee eksklusiivista: matkailupalvelut eivät ole paikallisille relevantteja eivätkä paikalliset ole mukana matkailun suunnittelussa. Tämänkaltainen matkailu tähtää usein ensisijaisesti taloudellisiin tavoitteisiin ja sen tuomat sosiaaliset hyödyt voivat jäädä vähäisemmiksi.
Väitöskirja haastaa nykyisen matkailusuunnittelun ja -kehityksen tilaa tuomalla keskusteluun sosiaalisen innovaation käsitteen. Sosiaaliset innovaatiot painottavat bisneskeskeisen suunnittelun sijaan kokonaisvaltaisempia sosiaalisen arvon ja yhteiskehittämisen periaatteita. Väitöskirjassa tarkastellaan etnografisen tutkimuksen kautta sosiaalisia innovaatioita suhteessa matkailuun Kemissä. Empiiristen esimerkkien kautta väitöskirja havainnollistaa yhteyksiä paikallislähtöisten sosiaalisten innovaatioiden ja matkailukehityksen välillä niin yksityisellä ja julkisella sektorilla kuin paikallisten nuorten näkökulmista.
Väitöskirja osallistuu keskusteluun siitä, miten matkailukehityksessä voitaisiin aiempaa paremmin huomioida paikallisnäkökulmien kirjo ja moninaiset paikalliset tarpeet. Väitöskirja esittää, että sosiaaliset innovaatiot voivat edistää inklusiivisempaa matkailun kehittämistä ja tukea paikallista resilienssiä. Samalla väitöskirja muistuttaa, että sosiaalisia innovaatioita on syytä tarkastella kriittisesti osana laajaa tavoitetta edistää sosio-ympäristöllisten, moniskaalaisten systeemien kestävyyttä.
Väitöskirja sijoittuu oikeudenmukaisuuden maantieteen alaan ja on samalla ensimmäinen suomalainen oikeudenmukaisuuden maantieteeseen liittyvä väitöskirjatutkimus. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on luoda teoreettisia ja empiirisiä avauksia spatiaalisia oikeudenmukaisuuksia sekä oikeudenmukaisuuksien maantieteitä koskevaan keskusteluun, johon tutkimus osallistuu kolmen artikkelin sekä niitä yhdistävän yhteenveto-osuuden muodossa. Tutkimus tuottaa yhden näkökulman oikeudenmukaisuuden maantieteeseen, jossa maantieteellinen tutkimusote yhdistyy filosofiseen, oikeustieteelliseen ja historialliseen tutkimusotteeseen. Väitöskirjan korostama oikeudenmukaisuuteen ja spatiaalisiin oikeudenmukaisuuskäsityksiin liittyvän suhteellisuuden ymmärtäminen rakentaa myös siltaa erilaisten ääripäiden väliselle yhteistoiminnalle sekä perusoikeuksien luoman yhteenkuuluvuuden tilan tiedostamiselle niin tieteellisessä kuin yhteiskunnallisessa elämässä.
Geodiversiteetti, eli elottoman luonnon monimuotoisuus, on saanut kasvavaa huomiota tieteellisessä keskustelussa. Se tarkoittaa maan pintaosien geologisten, geomorfologisten ja hydrologisten piirteiden monimuotoisuutta, ja muodostaa perustan myös biologiselle monimuotoisuudelle eli biodiversiteetille.
Tässä väitöstutkimuksessa tarkastellaan geodiversiteetin käsitettä ja sen suhdetta biodiversiteettiin. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on kehittää menetelmiä geodiversiteetin määrälliseen arviointiin ja löytää sovelluksia luonnonsuojeluun. Tutkimus sisältää teoreettisen katsauksen geodiversiteetin ja biodiversiteetin väliseen suhteeseen, sekä tarkastelee sitä empiirisesti makeanveden ekosysteemeissä ja maaekosysteemeissä. Väitöskirjassa esitellään myös ensimmäinen Euroopan laajuinen geodiversiteettiaineisto, joka mahdollistaa aiheen laajan jatkotutkimuksen.
Tutkimus haastaa perinteiset, elollisiin tekijöihin keskittyvät käsitykset luonnon monimuotoisuudesta. Geodiversiteetin tunnettuuden lisääminen edistää kokonaisvaltaisempaa lähestymistapaa ympäristöömme niin tutkimuksessa kuin yleisessä keskustelussa.
Edited by Sonja Pietiläinen & Ville Kellokumpu
Valentin Domann – Shifting notions of the rural: Protests over traffic infrastructure and far-right normalization
Johanna Hanson – Looking beyond climate contrarianism: nationalism and the reterritorialization of climate discourse in Spain’s Vox party
John Peter Antonacci – Green Großraum: Carl Schmitt’s political ecology of space
Alexandra McFadden – Hindutva Civilizationism in India: Unravelling the Human-Ecological Conditions
Diren Valayden – Governing “decadent cities”: The far-right as agents of climate counterinsurgency
Lise Benoist – Far-right localism as an environmental strategy in France
Sonja Pietiläinen – The nightless nights of the ‘Nazi camp’: The Finnish far-right’s anti-climate politics in urban space
Evi-Carita Riikonen – Imagining Finland: negotiating the sense of self through return imaginaries
Depoliticization is a pivotal political strategy that defines the contemporary governance of core capitalist democracies. This thesis asks how depoliticization manifests itself as a political strategy in the spatial restructuring of the Finnish state space. The differentiation of the economic and the political sphere and the resulting ecological dominance of “the economy” under capitalism provides a unique setting for depoliticization to appear in the form of economization. The thesis applies strategic-relational state theory and the theories of uneven development to examine depoliticization.
The overall contribution of the thesis reveals how the material interdependence of the political sphere with other societal spheres and the social totality of capitalist society produces a specific place for politics that conditions its operational autonomy. The normative critique of depoliticization should move from the level of critiquing politics to a critique of the social totality which produces a specific place for politics.
Edited by Aapo Lunden & Carlos Tornel
Tim May – Friends of the Lake? Ontological Ambiguities and the Megacolector Conflict
António Carvalho & Mariana Riquito – Listening-with the subaltern: Anthropocene, Pluriverse and more-than-human agency
Marina Wertheimer – Environmental conflicts and cultural misunderstandings in a Buenos Aires wetland settlement
Erandi Maldonado-Villalpando & Jaime Paneque-Gálvez – Grassroots innovation in alternatives to development: a review
Arturo Escobar, Carlos Tornel & Aapo Lunden – On design, development and the axes of pluriversal politics: An interview with Arturo Escobar
Jason W. Moore – Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History: Dialectical Universalism & the Geographies of Class Power in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1492-2022
Federico Luisetti – Pluriversalism and the Ecological Regime of Accumulation
Japhy Wilson – The Insurgent Universal: Between Eurocentric Universalism and the Pluriverse
Carlos Tornel – Seeking common ground: On possible dialogues between Marxisms and Political Ontology
Finnish upper secondary geography education has faced major changes within the last decade. In 2014, geography lost one of its compulsory courses in the distribution of lesson hours. Afterward, curriculum reforms were conducted in 2015 and 2019, and the geography test in the Finnish matriculation examination was digitalized in 2016. Similar major changes have occurred across the globe over the last 20 years as geography’s position in schools has weakened. Therefore, geography educationists have engaged in discussion regarding the kinds of knowledge and thinking skills that geography encourages young people to learn during their years in school. This thesis acknowledges that geography involves much more than teaching and learning simple facts about world’s topography, regions, and places, which is how geography is usually understood in popular views.
The aim of this thesis is to widen our understanding of thinking skills and powerful knowledge in the context of geography education. Theoretically, the thesis brings together discussions of powerful geographical knowledge with thinking skills and knowledge dimensions from a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy, and it suggests that these can be used as two “lenses” through which to examine geography. The main objective of the thesis is to examine geography’s potential to engage students in thinking skills and powerful geographical knowledge, using Finnish upper secondary geography education as an example.
Tämä väitöskirja tutkii osallistavan paikkatiedon (PPGIS) käyttöä maankäytön suunnittelussa ja päätöksenteossa pohjoisilla harvaan asutuilla alueilla. Päätutkimuskysymys on: Minkälaisia käytäntöjä ja tietoa osallistava paikkatieto tuo julkiseen osallistamiseen maankäytön suunnittelussa pohjoisilla alueilla?
Pohjoisilla harvaan asutuilla alueilla on erityispiirteitä, jotka tuovat haasteita maankäytön suunnitteluun. Maat ovat yleensä valtion tai kunnan omistuksessa, ja alueisiin kohdistuu monia paikallisten ja ulkopaikkakuntalaisten intressejä. Erilaisten maankäyttömuotojen (esimerkiksi matkailu, luonnonsuojelu, kaivostoiminta, metsätalous, alkuperäiskansat, virkistyskäyttö, paikallisten ja ulkopaikkakuntalaisten näkemykset sekä poronhoito) yhteensovittaminen on välttämätöntä. Keskiössä ovat erilaisen tiedon, maankäytön suunnittelun sekä osallisuuden ja vuorovaikutuksen merkitykset ja roolit. Keskeinen kysymys on, ketkä ja mitkä intressit johtavat maankäytön suunnittelua ja päätöksiä.
The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles.
To comprehensively understand the impact of anthropogenic activities on biodiversity, we must understand how biodiversity has changed over time and its underlying processes. Regardless of a recent increase in scientific interest towards changes in community composition, i.e. beta diversity, these changes have not been studied comprehensively in lake environments in a spatio-temporal framework. In addition, although biotic homogenisation has gained much attention in recent decades, it is still unclear how this process acts at different levels of biodiversity through time.
The main aim of this thesis is to study temporal and spatial biodiversity patterns of vascular aquatic macrophyte communities in small boreal lakes during a period of 70 years. The focus is on beta diversity-environment relationships and different dimensions of biodiversity, with special attention to functional features. This thesis is based on three separate case studies that all have utilised temporal presence-absence data of vascular aquatic macrophytes from 27 to 28 lakes from the 1940s to the 2010s.
Edited by Ville Kellokumpu & Aapo Lunden
Carlos Tornel – Petro-populism and infrastructural energy landscapes: The case of Mexico’s Dos Bocas Refinery
Marika Kettunen – “We need to make our voices heard”: Claiming space for young people’s everyday environmental politics in northern Finland
Ruiying Liu – Strategies for sustainability in shrinking cities: frames, rationales and goals for a development path change
Keijo Lakkala – Utopianism in the Age of Capitalocene
Luke Struckman – Technological and institutional lock-in and excessive synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use on North American grain and oilseed farms
Suvi Huttunen – Socio-cultural lock-ins and the difficulty of sustainability transition in fertilization – Response to Struckman
Silvia Secchi – The political economy of unsustainable lock-ins in North American commodity agriculture: a path forward – Response to Struckman
What is ‘Arctic’ in ‘Arctic tourism’? What makes the distinction between ‘Arctic tourism’ and ‘tourism in the Arctic’? Can we set and designate boundaries for Arctic tourism and can we find a consensus for its definition? This study explores these questions by investigating tourists’ practices and representations of the Arctic at the moment of crossing the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi.
In his thesis, Varnajot offers a reconceptualization of Arctic tourism, not solely based on a spatial perspective, but also grounded in tourists’ experiences. It is argued that for future smart and more responsible practices, Arctic tourism, both as a segment and as a concept, should be understood as fluid in time and space, adapting to the dynamic nature of the Arctic and its myriad of cultures, rather than being locked in stereotypical images, products and activities.
Ecosystems support human existence and well-being through supply of services. Alongside the benefits, ecosystems also produce disservices that are perceived as unwanted, unpleasant or economically harmful. In both cases, most services and disservices are commonly produced and consumed (or encountered) in areas geographically distant from each other, which is a challenge in the assessment and mapping of ecosystem (dis)services.
This thesis meet this challenge by testing the applicability of spatial accessibility analysis to assess the availability and access to ecosystem services, but also the suitability of the used methods for measuring the negative effects that nature can cause for people. The results showed that accessibility approach has a high potential to offer an efficient method to assess the transfer of ecosystem services and disservices through active transport of goods or traveling of people. This method also responded to the need to develop a practical tool for both ecosystem service and disservice research and decision-making.
During the past few decades, the Arctic has become increasingly understood as a changing region. This change incorporates issue areas from climatic and environmental change to economic, political and social change. While much of the public and academic discussion on the ‘changing’ Arctic has taken the Arctic for granted as a regional framework in which the processes of change occur, there is a need to understand how this knowledge on change itself has been constructed, and how it has been attached to the Arctic as a distinct region. By building on this background, this thesis seeks to analyze how the understanding of the Arctic as a changing region contributes to different political and spatial dynamics, which are approached empirically by a focus on the Arctic strategies and policies of Finland, France, Japan and Alaska.
A key argument of the thesis is that we cannot understand the current political discussion on the Arctic without understanding the regionalization process in which the Arctic has been constructed as a distinct region in relation to specific criteria. The results show that different ideas regarding what the Arctic region is have become key issues driving policy-making processes and political debate. Further, the results show that these policies and political debates are themselves key mediums through which the region and regional knowledge are produced, contested and transformed. This indicates that regional knowledge itself is politically meaningful, and scientists, too, should be attentive of the political implications that the knowledge we produce may have.
CONTENTS
1 Heikki Sirviö Introduction to Energy and Nomos theme issue - Energetic underpinnings of the legal-political order and its transformation
7 Simo Sarkki Contested emergency: Five gaming strategies between environmental and economic science-policy-society coalitions
31 Teemu Suorsa Energy, Experience, and Educational Psychology: Changing practices in and beyond Fossil Capitalism
47 Kyle Conway Chronotopes of Petromodernity: Oil and Mobile Privatization in the 1950s
63 Giovanni Frigo Post-fossil Nomoi of Energy
75 Katariina Ala-Rämi, Kyllikki Taipale-Erävala & Mirja Väänänen Structural change as an opportunity for a post-mining region: The case of Pyhäjärvi, Finland
Perennially frozen ground, permafrost, governs complex geo- and ecosystems in the Arctic. Millions of people reside on the frozen ground that has historically supported the integrity of their cities and transportation infrastructure. Permafrost, however, is not permanent but sensitive to the ongoing climate change. Recently, rapid warming and thawing of permafrost have been observed globally. This is prone to incur continued, increasingly crucial implications for the natural and human systems in the Arctic.
This thesis examines the contemporary characteristics of the Northern Hemisphere permafrost and assesses its sensitivities to 21st-century climate change. The results show that near-surface permafrost and associated landforms may be lost over extensive areas, and that permafrost thaw-related ground instabilities put a large amount of Arctic infrastructure at risk.
Biodiversity patterns in streams have been shown to be structured by direct physical properties of the local habitat and by proxy features on the catchment and regional scales, but one problem has been related to moderate explanatory power using such traditional environmental variables. This study investigates biodiversity patterns in northern streams by introducing the use of geographical proxy variables of environmental features (i.e. geodiversity) and dispersal (i.e. different geographical distances).
According to the results, traditional environmental variables contributed most to the variation in stream biodiversity. However, geographical proxies were useful in understanding biodiversity-environment relationships. If further developed, similar proxy variables to those presented in this thesis could offer complementary insights to help explain the structuring of biodiversity patterns in streams. In addition, conservation efforts of stream environments may also benefit from the identified cost-efficient proxy variables helping to understand the nuances in biodiversity variation.
Municipalities play an increasingly important role in spatial planning in Finland. During the last decades, planning powers have been transferred to the local level while deconstructing the mechanisms of top-down steering. Local communities and stakeholders are seen to counterbalance the circumscribed bureaucratic control of land use.
In his thesis, Hytönen analyzes the transformation of Finnish spatial planning with a focus on the relationship between public steering and market actors. He describes how expert-driven welfarist planning is evolving to suit the needs of business facilitation and the competitiveness of the municipalities, in a flexible juridical framework. Hytönen recommends the safeguarding of public steering capacities in order to better cope with the fundamental environmental and societal challenges of spatial planning.
To increase sustainability in tourism destinations, tourism research has highlighted the need for collective economic agency in destination localities. To date, research has tended to draw on multiple, often contradicting, theoretical perspectives in an attempt to clarify how collective agency in tourism destinations should be best organized in order to foster social justice and ecological sustainability.
In her thesis, Kulusjärvi introduces a poststructural political economy approach for the study of economic agency and sustainability transformation in the Finnish North. The less growth-focused economic thinking and value-driven collective actions are brought to light as valuable forms of economic practice, also with respect to overall destination development. It is argued that this unconventional view on economic path creation is to be encouraged as it is better in line with climate change mitigation needs.
In order to understand the development prospects of border areas and the preconditions of transnational regionalisation, municipal planning of border areas needs to be approached not only from the perspective of EU-driven cross-border co-operation and building of “transnational” scale, but more comprehensively. Accordingly, the present research on the Finnish-Swedish border area, which is an internal border area of the EU, takes a more historically and contextually sensitive institutional approach in this regard.
The thesis investigates the structural and discursive dynamics related to the institutionalisation of cross-border co-operation as a development strategy in the context of municipal planning. This enables not only identification of the conflicts and intersections between state-, EU- and local/regional-level development interests and institutional structures, but also provides room for recognising the diversity of the existing interests, strategies and motivations of local and regional actors and different interest groups involved in these institutionalisation processes.
The capability of present conservation actions to protect and sustain biodiversity in the face of global change is under debate. One solution could be Conserving Nature´s Stage framework which states that geodiversity (e.g. data on geological, geomorphological and hydrological richness) could be used as a coarse filter strategy for conserving biodiversity. This study investigates the potential of the framework by examining the relationship between biodiversity and geodiversity at high-latitude environments.
The results of this thesis highlighted the overall positive relationships between geo- and biodiversity at both landscape and local scales. Geodiversity added explanatory power for biodiversity models and accounted uniquely for richness patterns for both common and threatened species of multiple taxa. This reinforces recent arguments that Conserving Nature´s Stage is an important and valid principle in conservation.
Visitor use of national parks must be efficiently planned to cope with increasing and diversifying use of these areas. Academics worldwide have proposed that the use of Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) could improve national park management. This study further investigates the potential of PPGIS methods in the context of planning for outdoor recreation in national parks, and does so by incorporating views of practitioners working in Finnish national park management.
The study increases the understanding of factors that influence visitor experiences, and reveals how PPGIS methods could serve visitor planning practices and frameworks. Moreover, the study advances understandings of challenges and opportunities related to implementing PPGIS methods into outdoor recreation planning.
The variation in species-based information has been the most commonly used approach to quantify how biodiversity varies through space and time, omitting the different evolutionary histories of each species and the fact that communities are constituted of species with different ecological roles. Stream biodiversity patterns have been demonstrated to be related to local-, catchment-, and regional-scale variables, but it is still an open question how these different sets of variables affect different facets of biodiversity in streams ecosystems (i.e., traits and phylogeny). In this thesis, I investigated large-scale biodiversity patterns across northern streams by assessing the influence of different sets of variables (ranging from local habitat to large-scale geographical) underlying these patterns and through the investigation of different facets of biodiversity (i.e., species, traits and phylogenies).
Nordia Geographical Publications (NGP) is a non-profit peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Geographical Society of Northern Finland and the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu.
The Geographical Society of Northern Finland also publishes the Nordia Tiedonantoja (NT) series. You can find the series here.
