Suchergebnisse

The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement is a major climate movement on a global scale, calling for systemic change and demanding politicians act on their responsibilities. In this paper, we present and analyze original findings from a case study on the FFF movement in Finland, at a watershed moment for young climate activism. We explore the representations of young people's environmental citizenship within the framings of the FFF movement, using an environ-mental citizenship framework analysis of the Finnish news media and Twitter discussions. We identified three frames within the media debate on the school strikes: the sustainable lifestyle frame, which focuses on the individual aspects of environmental citizenship, the active youth frame, which focuses on justifications of youth participation in politics, and the school attendance frame, which is concerned about the young people's strike action. Our results explore the many aspects of environmental citizenship that young people express in the FFF movement. We reflect on the dominance of adult voices in the framing of this historic movement of young people for action on climate change. Our analysis contributes to a step change in the study of this important global movement, which is shaping the emergence of young people as active citizens in Finland and around the world. We argue that the FFF movement is shaping young people's perceptions of active citizenship, and we advocate a youth-centred focus on the collective action and justice demands of young people.

This article analyses the impact of stakeholder participation in the drafting process of the Environmental Protection Act, which regulates the licensing of peat extraction in Finland. The article contributes to research on the impact of stakeholder participation in regulatory processes, which is a generally underexplored field of study, and seeks to identify which arguments affected the end result. Furthermore, it addresses whether the legislative drafter took into account influential arguments as a result of rational choice arrived at by means of adequate reasoning and under conditions of procedural transparency. Finally, it analyses how these arguments reflect the attitudes of stakeholders towards the objective and dynamics of the public hearing process. The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative argumentation analysis, which consists of an argument typology, together with analysis both of the feasibility of different arguments and the frequency with which they were employed and of the realisation of different viewpoints on the draft. The analysis shows stakeholders' statements had significant effectiveness but that the weight given to different arguments was unbalanced. In conclusion, it seems that frequently used arguments were ignored without reasons being given but that rarely used arguments that seem difficult to apply had an influence on the process. Moreover, stakeholders that supported the objective of the Act used arguments that could not be easily taken into account while still achieving the objective of the Act. Meanwhile, arguments indicating problems that were easy to fix in the draft were used to oppose the objective of the Act per se. Consequently, there was no clear consensus among stakeholders as to whether the public hearing process should be understood as amounting to aggregative bargaining or integrative deliberation. Based on these findings, it is suggested that participatory processes in legislative drafting should be developed to foster horizontal dialogue between stakeholders. ; final draft ; peerReviewed

The European Union's Water Framework Directive introduced a new approach to the system of water management in Europe by nominating the river basin district as the basic unit in water management. While its transboundary character aims to better manage natural resources, its design and implementation carries several challenges due to its weak integration of various bordering effects related to administrative boundaries that strongly affect the directives' implementation. Based on a comparative document based case study of two river basin districts – the International Oder River Basin District (IORBD) and the International Torne River Basin District (ITRBD) – the paper scrutinizes the effects on the implementation processes of the directive and aims to draw attention to identify the differences that derive from various socio-spatial settings during the first cycles of water management plans from 2009 to 2015. By thematically comparing biophysical characteristics, cross-border cooperation, cultural and administrative borderingprocesses the study displays a mismatch between the directives aims for transboundary governance and the actual governance processes which are hampered by a variety of conflicting bordering processes.

This article examines the public perceptions on the drafting process of Finnish Climate Act amendment, which is a legislation on the climate policy that aims to mitigate climate change and secure adaptive capacity. In this paper we present results of a thematic analysis, which reveals citizens' perceptions of the procedural values, with respect to transparency, participation, and acceptance, and the objectives of the amendment, such as the climate neutrality target for 2035. The research data consisted of 2,458 answers to a citizen survey on the Finnish Climate Change Act amendment. Our results reveal that the opinions of citizens ranged from highlighting the urgency of political action to climate denials, with varying perceptions on process and proposed outcomes. While over half of citizens felt positively about the 2035 climate neutrality target created in the Climate Change Amendment Act, only a third believed that there was appropriate opportunity for public participation in the amendment process. Based on these findings, we suggest that participatory and transparent processes in legislative drafting are prerequisites for the sustainability transition and the implementation of international climate mitigation targets. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

This article aims to reveal the political positioning of 'mire nature' in Finnish peatland policy and law. The data analysed include the latest policy documents, laws and regulations related to mires and peat extraction. Analysis is based on frame analysis (i.e. how an object is defined and positioned) and ideas drawn from a political ecology approach. Two main frames can be identified within the Finnish legal and policy framework: peat as a natural resource to be utilised for national energy sufficiency and economic competitiveness, and peat as a valuable source of biodiversity and an integral element of global ecosecurity. Analysis reveals the degree to which the definition of issues or objects in legal and policy terms is important in determining outcomes. It also reveals that national policies have swung back and forth and are prone to economic power struggles. Furthermore, while laws and regulations have offered strong and longstanding support for the extractive use of peat, the latest regulatory developments show a break from this trend. However, the arguments and facts concerning climate change are poorly integrated with Finnish peatland policy and law.