The participation of citizens in land use planning and decision-making in Northern areas – the potential of PPGIS in increasing interaction

This doctoral dissertation studies the use of the public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) in land use planning and decision-making in sparsely populated Northern regions. The main research question is: What types of practices and knowledge does PPGIS bring to public participation in land use planning in Northern regions? Sparsely populated Northern regions pose a specific challenge for planning. In those regions, land ownership by the state or the municipality is general and there are many different interests by locals and non-locals in the same regions. The reconciliation of different land uses is essential because of the many interests (e.g., tourism, nature conservation, mining, forestry, indigenous people, interests of locals and non-locals, recreation and reindeer herding). The different roles of the information, land use and the development of the participation and interaction in land use planning are in focus. The relevant question is who and which interests lead land use planning and decisions. In this research, the participation in land use planning processes in sparsely populated Northern regions has been examined and participation possibilities have been developed with a mixed method approach. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used in the data collection and analysis. The best practices of the use of PPGIS have been studied as well as the novelty of the PPGIS knowledge. The implementation of PPGIS data in decision making, one of the biggest challenges in the field of PPGIS research, has also been examined. The approach of the research is empirical. The research is a case study and three different sets of data have been collected from Finnish Lapland, sparsely populated regions, from 2015 - 2019. This research used electronic and paper PPGIS, interviews and studying reports and documents. The data is qualitative, quantitative and spatial, and was analyzed with the principles of theory driven content analysis and GIS analyzing methods (theme maps). The results show that the maintenance and development of the participation possibilities in land use planning are an important part of democratic society. It is essential to maintain discussion, debate, criticism and right of appeal. In the Northern regions with many land use interests, there is no one right way to involve people. The participation is context sensitive; the involvement process and involvement groups need to be estimated in every situation, place and context. PPGIS has the possibility to improve interaction in sparsely populated regions. The benefits of PPGIS appeared strongly for different data, for example, visually and presenting data on the map in the spatial mode, the possibility to virtually and remotely collect information from a big audience (both locals and non-locals) and the possibility to handle and combine a large amount of digitalized, spatial data. Increasing trust and transparency between different groups were remarkable issues as well. In sparsely populated regions, the fear of stigma is important to take into account when people participate. Thus, PPGIS can encourage people to participate in the land use planning processes due to its characteristics of maintaining anonymity. It is essential that PPGIS method is used for the real, and even acute, land use needs and thus, motivating respondents to answer is easier and the likelihood of the results being used increases. If the use of the PPGIS method is not strongly linked to the planning process, the results might be of little consequence. Hence, it is recommended that the use of PPGIS is connected with the planning process and in the early phases. The interest of the organizational managers toward the PPGIS method is essential so that the benefits would be as strong as possible. The PPGIS method cannot replace other participation methods, but it is good to view as one tool in participation and collecting social spatial data. When the PPGIS method is used, it is important to be critical because the tool is often a commercial product and there is a risk that the needs of the user are not responded to, for example, with the technical characteristics. Making an internet-based PPGIS survey is relatively easy, but it is relevant to use sufficiently deep analysis after gathering the data, for example, with GIS analyzing methods. Systematic storing of PPGIS data in the IT-system of the organization is crucial so that the information is subsequently easy to access. Keywords PPGIS, land use planning, participation, reconciliation of land use interests, sparsely populated Northern areas

For Postcapitalist Studies: Inheriting Futures of Space and Economy

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. This thesis offers a theoretical contribution to this juncture by bringing together the feminist economic geography of JK Gibson-Graham and the deconstructive philosophical practice of Jacques Derrida. Gibson-Graham’s framework of diverse economies has become a major contribution to thinking and practising postcapitalist politics. It offers a popular affirmative and experimental approach to collective life, one that discards the givenness of economic truths and power in favour of a heterogeneous landscape of interdependent agency. Here, however, the attention is on Gibson-Graham’s early, theoretical examination and critique of capitalocentrism: the omission, forgetting and subjugation of existing more-than-capitalist economies. This notion underlines the necessity to unlearn capitalist homogeneity in order for a plural, prismatic economy of coexistence to come to view: the worst forms of exploitation coexisting with the best of emancipations, both demanding situated negotiation and collective action. Capitalocentrism functions as a conceptual ground of the diverse economies framework, yet its theoretical, empirical and political complexity has largely been left unexamined. While the concept of capitalocentrism works to motivate its alternatives, its use simultaneously exhibits an unproblematised belief in overcoming the problem of postcapitalist burdens. To think capitalocentrism as a continuous, unownable task, rather than a solid stepping stone for emancipation, it is theorised here as an inheritance with the help of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s ‘rigorously parasitic’ approach towards constitutive givens and his negotiation of troubling legacies offer a distinct approach to received problematics. Here, his writings on heritage, archives and violence are examined as situated practices of reinterpretative work with/in various legacies. This allows a distinct conceptual and methodological approach to inheritances that pivots on a vigilance of (self-)critique and a practice of close, complicit reading. The inheritedness of our textual materiality, with its historical promises and perils all too closely intertwined, becomes the issue. It allows a persistent negotiation of and oscillation between determinate, situated problematics and the incalculable and unlocatable. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism becomes a heterogeneous and unownable legacy that both enables and haunts the thinking of postcapitalist space and economy. Developing such a conceptual and methodological approach to postcapitalist problems, this thesis studies capitalocentric inheritances in four main chapters. First, the concept of capitalocentrism and its critical role in Gibson-Graham’s framework is treated in light of deconstruction’s promises. Second, Derrida’s economies of violence are studied to conceptualise capitalocentrism as a problem of history. Third, popular and academic debates concerning postcapitalism are explored as negotiations of capitalocentric inheritances. Fourth, the capitalocentrism of language itself becomes the issue as a problematic negotiated in sites and theories of translation. Altogether, this study proposes an attention to postcapitalist economic geographies that supplements emancipatory approaches with a critical-deconstructive attention to their limitations. Amidst immediate demands for social and economic transformation, it underlines what mediates those demands: the troubled language, the complicit sensorium that we inherit. By offering fresh grounds for rethinking the inherited futures of space and economy, it submits a challenge to claims that purport to govern and overcome the postcapitalist problem of constitutive burdens. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism necessitates drastic renegotiations of postcapitalist givens. This task is here called, tentatively, postcapitalist studies. Keywords capitalocentrism, deconstruction, diverse economies, inheritance, Jacques Derrida, JK Gibson-Graham, postcapitalist studies

Spatial and temporal trends in different dimensions of macrophyte biodiversity in boreal lakes

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. Vascular aquatic macrophyte communities showed only moderately different spatial beta diversity patterns in relation to human impact across decades. The patterns of different dimensions of spatial beta diversity diverged only slightly from each other. The temporal change in aquatic macrophyte communities at the lake level has beenmodest since the 1940s. Nevertheless, it seems that even relatively modest changes in the environment affect temporal gains and losses of species at the lake level. There were no signs of either biotic homogenisation or biotic differentiation (taxonomic, phylogenetic or functional), but the changes in the environment have affected functional community composition and changes in functional richness to some extent. By using the spatial and temporal beta diversity perspective, this thesis highlights the fact that even though biotic homogenisation is a pervasive problem globally, it is not an unambiguous process acting similarly at all spatial and temporal scales or in different environments and different organism groups. There are likely five partly interdependent reasons why no signs of biotic homogenisation were detected in the study area during the 70-year study period: the modest changes in the environment from the 1940s to the 2010s, high ecological resilience of the lakes, information on species presence and absence was used instead of abundance data, biotic interactions and complex community-environment relationships together with stochastic processes and climate change. The results highlight that relying on only one or two survey points in time can result in limited knowledge of the ecological phenomenon under study, and an exceptional year in terms of weather conditions can hinder detecting overall long-term trends in compositional changes, especially under ongoing climate change. The patterns detected in macrophyte beta diversity are likely to represent situations in the extensive boreal and glaciated areas of Eurasia and North America, with largely similar species pools in many regions. Therefore, lakes across the boreal region and areas that have faced glaciation and postglacial processes might be resistant against moderate levels of human pressure.

Utopianism in the Age of Capitalocene

This article explores the social and political imagination of ‘the Anthropocene’ and the utopian counter images that can be derived from it. From the utopian studies perspective, I argue that the Anthropocene cannot provide sufficient societal alternatives for the current ecological predicament. This is due to the fact that the concept of Anthropocene relies too heavily on the image of abstract humanity to be able to offer real societal alternatives. It cannot name the social system we live in and, therefore, it cannot fundamentally challenge existing social arrangements. Based on utopian social theory, I conceptualize utopia as a counter image of the present motivated by a desire for better being. The contents and the politically transformative potentials of utopian counter-images depend on the conceptualization of the present itself. I contrast the utopian potentials of ‘the Anthropocene’ with that of ‘the Capitalocene’ which is more apt in outlining the social conditions of the present. Thus, the Capitalocene as a concept opens up more radical possibilities for imagining societal alternatives by conceptualizing the present socially.

“We need to make our voices heard”: Claiming space for young people’s everyday environmental politics in northern Finland

Recent years have seen a critical shift in young people’s political participation, as young people around the world have mobilized to demand greater climate actions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that consist of participant observation and 47 qualitative interviews with 15–16-year-olds residing in rural and urban areas in northern Finland, the paper contributes rural, regional and mundane perspectives on the topic of young people’s environmental politics. The paper sheds light on the myriad of ways in which young people practice environmental politics and construct their environmental citizenship and also discusses young people’s political action in relation to the friction and resistance their participation stirs up in the local communities. Although promoting active citizenship is a stated goal of the Finnish education system, young people’s active participation in mundane and local environmental politics is not always embraced in local communities. The paper argues for better recognition of and support for young people’s everyday environmental politics and for youth participation as a way to spark wider social, cultural, and political change.

Petro-populism and infrastructural energy landscapes: The case of Mexico’s Dos Bocas Refinery

In 2018, recently elected presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) promised the construction of a new refinery in Mexico. Arguing a lack of energy independence and the urgent need to ‘rescue’ petro-state giant PEMEX and the stateowned electricity company CFE from the mismanagement and neoliberal policies of previous administrations, the Dos Bocas Refinery (DBR) became one of the main flagship projects of AMLO’s administration symbolizing a discourse of energy security and national pride. This paper reviews the process of approval and construction of the refinery by assessing, the material and relational character of energy infrastructure, the “politics and poetics” that are built into the promises of infrastructure projects, and the shifting temporalities of infrastructure and their interaction with emerging ‘petropopulist landscapes’ which serve as material evidence of oil-led development. Drawing on Anthropology's and Geography’s ‘infrastructural turn’, this paper reviews a series of government documents, speeches and declarations supported by interviews with energy experts to understand the symbolic meaning of energy infrastructure and how the DBR has become deeply entangled with a nationalist political project which has instituted an inertial path-dependence towards the continued use of fossil fuels, off-staging other concerns associated to climate change and the energy transition at the national level.

Technological and institutional lock-in and excessive synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use on North American grain and oilseed farms

This intervention examines commodity grain and oilseed farmers’ over reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in North America. Most grain and oilseed farmers apply synthetic nitrogen fertilizer at rates higher than necessary in order to ensure maximum yields. At the same time, high fertilizer application rates lead to increased farm input expenses and generate significant amounts of water pollution and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. A number of low-cost alternative approaches have been developed which can significantly reduce or eliminate the need for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer while maintaining farm profitability. But such practices have only seen limited adoption by Canadian and US farmers. This is despite significant production cost savings and environmental benefits. A number technological and institutional factors work in combination to lock farmers into production models requiring large amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. They include crop varieties bred to thrive in artificially high nitrogen soil conditions, conventional tillage practices, restrictive financial arrangements, largely unenforced water quality laws, and non-diverse marketing outlets. These technological and institutional lock-ins are significant barriers to the adoption of alternative crop production practices that are less reliant upon synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

The political economy of unsustainable lock-ins in North American commodity agriculture: a path forward – Response to Struckman

In this commentary, I argue that in North America, the overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is due to institutional and technological lock-ins, which are the result of historical policies with deep roots in an agricultural system focused on increasing production of commodities with disregard for their full social costs. Further, excessive fertilizer use is integral to production systems that have disconnected crop and livestock production to the extent that manure is a waste product, which further creates environmental problems. In order to address the environmental and social problems associated with industrial agriculture, it will be necessary to bring market prices closer to true social costs, thereby eliminating overproduction of commodity grains and oilseeds, and to promote more diverse agricultural landscapes.

Strategies for sustainability in shrinking cities: Frames, rationales and goals for a development path change

Addressing the challenges and opportunities in shrinking cities requires approaches and strategies different from those that have been applied under growth conditions. Research on shrinking cities has generated a plethora of approaches and strategies for the shrinkage trajectory and has identified sustainability as a guiding principle. However, shrinking city development in practice either cannot confront the situation of shrinkage, or does so without an integrative, consistent approach, while the concept of sustainability has ambiguous meanings, giving rise to competing or contradicting rationales. This paper identifies the need for clearer directions for a re-orientation away from the growth-oriented approaches, in conjunction with a critical reflection on what sustainability means for different shrinking cities. Towards this end, it first assembles an overview of the strategic framings behind urban development ideas proffered in the shrinking city discourse, with a focus on the temporal, agential and spatial dimensions and the cross-cutting frame of higher-level interdependencies. Secondly, with a deeper reflection on the inner tensions of the sustainability concept, it distils the key rationales and proposes new strategy-making approaches for a development path change towards sustainable development that responds to different local situations.