Browsing by Subject "Just transition"
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(2023)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.
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(2024)The Finnish forestry sector today faces multiple pressures for renewal, demands of climate change and biodiversity loss being the most recent and pertinent ones. The pressures are expected to materialize in the mid-term future: significant structural changes in the forest sector will most likely take place by 2040 (Kulvik et al., 2022). The Finnish forest sector is already in a state of flux, aiming for a transformation, with the state also seeking to reform it through various policies (Donner-Amnell, 2022). However, the concept of just transition has not been widely applied to the industry. This work uses qualitative content analysis to analyze strategies, roadmaps, programmes, action plans and other textual materials where actors of the forest policy arena envision the future of the sector. Recognizing that these expressions of the desired futures are not mere observations of what might happen, but strategic, political actions building those very futures, this study understands them as sociotechnical visions (Longhurst & Chilvers, 2019). This research seeks to articulate what kind of futures are promoted in these visions, how questions of justice are addressed in them, and discover patterns of politicization and depoliticization related to justice. Based on earlier research (Harrinkari et al., 2016), actors are assigned into three coalitions. The forestry coalition envisions a future where Finnish forestry products satisfy global demand and are seen as one solution to climate change. It prefers to frame ecological and social issues through the frames of responsibility and sustainability. The administrative coalition prioritizes the well-being of the Finnish nation and sees the forest industry as an important means to do so, thus wishing to maintain its operating conditions. The environmental coalition aims to maintain the values of nature and frames the environmental and social issues of forestry as questions of justice. Actors within the environmental coalition tend to choose frames that politicize the discourse, whereas the forestry coalition tends to choose depoliticizing ones. The present study demonstrates that actors employ the frame of justice to a varying extent. The academic literature on just transition often departs from the starting point of defining the limits of what is just. However, the present study shows that there are pertinent questions to be asked already before that. Future research is invited to pay attention to what makes actors embrace the concept of just transition and others reject it.
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