Jani Lukkarinen

Finnish Environment Institute | ymparisto · Environmental Policy Centre

Countries are moving towards renewable energy systems, which creates new requirements and pressures for the established energy policy frameworks. One emerging issue is citizen energy production in community level that has been given a central role also in recent policy reforms in the EU. However, one understudied topic is how the decision-making an...

2020-luku on tuonut kuntiin ratkaistavaksi monenlaisia kriisejä, joita kärjistävät kestävyyteen liittyvät haasteet – tulevan talven kannalta päällimmäisenä kenties energiaan liittyvät ongelmat. Samaan aikaan kunnat joutuvat uudistamaan rooliaan kuntalaisten hyvinvoinnissa, kun hyvinvointialueet aloittavat toimintansa. Toisaalta kunnilla on mahdolli...

Learning is commonly presented as one of the key premises of transitions governance. Empirical literature on learning in a sustainability transition context often remains on a generic level, without an in-depth analysis of what is learned and by whom. In this article, we address the study of learning in transition-related multi-party processes. We...

Nowadays we recognize that forests have a critical role in balancing our environment. Halting biodiversity loss, regulating climate, sequestering and storing carbon, and improving resilience against droughts, storms, pest outbreaks and other risks are among key ecosystem services. At the same time, forests provide a wide variety of products for the...

In the acceleration phase of energy transitions, the role of community and citizen action is emphasised. The role of active, smart and experimental communities and individuals adopting novel practices and technologies is often contrasted with more conventional and mundane everyday practices, which change only slowly. In this context, the role of ne...

Ongoing sustainability challenges create pressure on planning practices and institutional arrangements. Transformative policy visions, such as the circular economy and bioeconomy, create promises for designing and planning sustainable pathways in society. Moreover, research agendas on sustainability transitions, such as transition management, are d...

Various national policies guide forest use, but often with competing policy objectives leading to divergent management paradigms. Incoherent policies may negatively impact the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services (FES), and forest multifunctionality. There is uncertainty among policymakers about the impacts of policies on the real wor...

Energy transitions are in many respects past the early exploration stages and moving towards the urgently needed mass market take-up. We examine the Finnish energy transition regarding how solutions-heat-pumps, deep retrofits and new district-wide solutions-that have demonstrated economic benefits and reasonable payback times have faced slow uptake...

Doctoral dissertation in human geography conceptualising scalar politics in the intersection of natural resource governance and energy policy by utilising policies and politics of wood--based bioenergy in Finland and EU as a case study.

The blue bioeconomy is gaining momentum in EU policy debate and various national government strategies as a pathway towards a more sustainable society. Linked to the circularity of economic processes, it combines the promise of (regional) economic development with a sustainable, bio-based transition focused on increased and novel utilisation of aqu...

This article examines energy related experiments suggested and outlined in a co-creative Energy Transition Arena in Finland in 2017 with participating experts from various spheres of society. A transition arena is a process for engaging stakeholders in systemic transitions, and experiments are an important measure for enhancing transition and mecha...

Denmark, Germany, and Finland are countries that have emerged as technology leaders in key renewable energy fields—wind energy, solar power, and bioenergy. In this article, we dig into the policy trajectories of these countries and concentrate particularly on a phenomenon that is common for them all—the long-term commitment to promoting particular...

The roles of intermediaries in sustainability transitions are increasingly recognised. How intermediaries advance transitions vis-a-vis public policy has, however, received little attention. Thus, we create an analytical framework of intermediating policy processes, drawing from transition and policy cycle literatures. We apply this to investigate...

This paper investigates the potential role of energy services in the transition to nearly zero-energy buildings, by mobilising the concepts of product service systems, integrated-solutions and business ecosystems; so far, largely disconnected from the transitions literature. Using primary data from semi-structured interviews and publically availabl...

The project MULTIFOREST aims to lay a solid basis for solving the socio-ecological land-use conflicts in European boreal and temperate forests caused by incoherent EU and national policies. Novel insights are provided to forest policy, forest management and land-use planning by qualitative and quantitative impact analyses of policies and their rela...

Sustainability transitions require new policy pathways that significantly reduce the environmental impacts caused by, for example, energy production, mobility and food production. Transition management (TM) is one of the approaches aiming at the creation of new ways to govern transitions. It uses transitions arenas (TA) as a key process and platfor...

The reduction of environmental impacts of electricity use and the transition to renewable power generation crucially depend on demand response (DR). This article takes the political commitment to DR as a starting point and empirically examines Finnish stakeholders’ views on barriers to the utilization of DR and the ways in which these barriers coul...

The Technological Innovation System (TIS) framework has become a popular tool for the analysis of innovation dynamics, particularly on a national scale. There have been calls to utilise the framework at sub-national levels too, and to pay attention to location-specific features and interactions. This article contributes to the discussion by studyin...

Sustainable energy production solutions have gained momentum in energy production systems during recent decades. Technological developments, along with the transitions taking place in forestry, farming and energy networks, have produced opportunities for bioenergy production. However, the promotion and production of bioenergy takes place at the jun...

Suomessa ja EU:ssa on viime vuosina keskusteltu paljon puun energiakäytöstä. Sitä on toisaalta pyritty edistämään ja toisaalta rajoittamaan. Artikkelissa tarkastellaan poliittisten kysymysten kehystämisen näkökulmasta puun energiakäytöstä käytyä keskustelua 1900-luvun alkupuolelta tähän päivään. Artikkelissa asetetaan puun energiakäytön edistämises...