Browsing by Author "Kareoja, Kaisla"

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.