Browsing by Author "Forsman, Pauliina"

The green transition is necessary in mitigating climate change. However, it is not a problem-free development pathway from global justice and social sustainability point of views, as the manufacturing of green technologies require great amounts of minerals from the developing countries. Competition for mineral natural resources is creating growing pressure to increase mining activities, which in many countries involves environmental and human rights issues. This is feared to cause environmental destruction, and inhumane working and living conditions for the people in the mining areas, creating new global inequalities. To avoid this trajectory, demands for a just green transition, in which the benefits and harms of energy systems would be more evenly distributed globally, have been presented. The political pressure to implement the green transition is great. Therefore, many actors worldwide have committed to various carbon neutrality goals and cities play a key role in this. By the decision of the majority of the city councilors, also the city of Helsinki has set an ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2030, which requires a fast implementation of the green transition. In this master's thesis, the discussion minutes of the Helsinki city council in the years 2019–2022 were studied with an interpretative approach using discourse analysis as a method. The purpose was to find out how the green transition is discussed in the council and which factors influence the perceptions of the green transition presented there. In addition, the purpose was to research whether the council discussions propose any solutions to solve the challenges of global injustice connected to the green transition or whether those problems were recognized at all. As a result, three different discourses of unproblematic discourse, critical discourse, and must-do discourse were interpreted from the data. The unproblematic discourse viewed the green transition in a positive and/or neutral light, emphasizing the possibilities in climate change mitigation. Economic perspectives were also strongly present in this context. The identified critical discourse covered economic and social grievances related to the green transition, which were considered to be related to security of supply, economy, and ecological and social sustainability. In the third, i.e., the must-do discourse, the meaning of green technology was formed through the mitigation of climate change, which was seen threatening all life on Earth. In this view, global warming itself was seen as the greatest social and justice issue. Discourses and perceptions of Helsinki's green transition are strongly influenced by the city's way of focusing its emission calculations only on reducing the city's direct CO2 emissions. Thus, the social global effects caused by Helsinki's green transition cannot be verified with the city's current evaluation methods. Consequently, the councilors discuss the green transition from a strong local perspective.