Janne Hukkinen

• University of Helsinki

Historical records are incomplete templates for preparing for an uncertain future. The global utility of past ecological knowledge for present/future purposes is questioned as we move from Holocene to Anthropocene. To increase the adaptive capacity of today’s societies, generalizable strategies must be identified for coping with uncertainty over a...

Scientific knowledge is performative, as it not only represents but also constitutes reality. In politically charged fields such as ecological economics and environmental policy, science-policy interactions are often integrated into the scientific process. It is therefore important to articulate the details of the context in which knowledge perform...

Since the earliest stages of international climate policy, carbon dioxide (CO2) has been framed and widely accepted as a problem that needs to be solved by reducing its amount in the atmosphere. In principle this is a correct and relevant starting point for efforts to decarbonize societies. At the same time, however, the unquestioned and one-sided...

Isoaho, K., Burgas Riera, D., Janasik, N., Mönkkönen, M., Peura, M., & J.I. Hukkinen 2019 Abstract This paper explores whether the perceptions of forest owners and professionals could be nudged towards more sustainable management practices by adjusting a policy text’s metaphorical content. Recent research has demonstrated a link between informatio...

There is dispute over the climate change mitigating effect of boreal forest management due to the contrasting influence it has on different vectors influencing radiative forcing (RF). For the first time, this study has combined the estimated effects of carbon sequestration in forests and wood products, the surface albedo of forests, the direct and...

The transition to a sustainable energy regime is not just an engineering question, but a social and cultural issue as well. In this paper, we consider one contested technology still in development, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), from a socio-cultural perspective. CCS is widely deemed to be a necessary bridging technology to a low-carbon economy,...

I develop a conceptual model of the temporal dynamics of knowledge brokerage for sustainable development. Brokerage refers to efforts to make research and policymaking more accessible to each other. The model enables unbiased and systematic consideration of knowledge brokerage as part of policy evolution. The model is theoretically grounded in earl...

Nudging refers to the subtle design of the context of choice in a way that mobilises the unconscious mind and alters human behaviour predictably. Nudging has been criticised for entailing numerous practical and ethical problems, including manipulation, elitism and cultural insensitivity. To respond to the problems, participatory and deliberative pr...

Socially inefficient payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes result when adverse shifts in the provisioning of other ecosystem services (ES) or overpayment to service providers occur. To address these inefficiencies, a holistic evaluation of trade-offs between services should be conducted in parallel with determining land owners’ service provi...

The concept of temporal fit between biophysical systems and institutions has lately received great attention by scholars interested in environmental governance. Although we agree that the concept of temporal fit is a valuable approach for highlighting the temporal challenges of governance systems, we argue that the concept is currently lacking prec...

Two core concerns of ecological economists have for decades been to consider the economy as embedded in broader social–ecological systems (SESs) and to include multiple perspectives in knowledge production. To address these concerns, I argue, ecological economists need to return to the ontological question of what constitutes the SES and the episte...

The applicability of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry to the screening of steroidal compounds in wastewater is demonstrated. Advanced software was utilized to identify unknown compounds in complex two-dimensional chromatograms exploiting retention indices and two different mass spectral...

Analysis of fit has focused on the macrolevel fit between social institutions and ecosystems, and bypassed the microlevel fit between individual cognition and its socio-material environment. I argue that the conceptualizations we develop about social-ecological systems and our position in them should be understood as ways for a fundamentally cognit...

Many scholars of industrial ecology have focused on the institutional and organizational challenges of building and maintaining regional industrial symbiosis through the synergistic integration of material and energy flows. Despite the promise that these intellectual developments hold for the future dematerialization of industrial production, they...

Deliberative environmental policy links the formal institutional setting within which environmental policy takes place and the informal ways of thinking and doing by those whose daily work the policy influences. Despite an extensive theoretically oriented literature on policy deliberation, little methodological advice exists relating deliberation t...

Academic discussion on economic growth and the environment has made a comeback under the auspices of the degrowth debate. To date, however, literature on the topic has been mainly theoretical and empirical studies of actual policy discussions have received less attention. This article contributes to the debate with a narrative policy analysis of in...

The scope and cross-disciplinary nature of challenges related to sustainable consumption and production (SCP) have led to calls to develop national SCP programmes. This article analyses and evaluates one of the pioneers in the field, the Finnish programme to promote SCP. However, traditional evaluation approaches that are centred on effectiveness a...

The EU’s 2020 vision aims to deliver a bright future for Europe. This can only be achieved in the context of a sustainable, healthy environment. The Advisory Group on Environment (including climate change) sees the need to achieve a new balance between continued support for disciplinary research while at the same time fostering inter-disciplinary a...

Major and urgent behavioral change is required to address the unprecedented environmental challenges facing civilization on Earth. Individuals striving to free themselves from the biophysical constraints of life with material gain only strengthen their collective dependence on natural life support systems. Human belief networks from ancient to mode...

Both funding agencies and scholars in science studies have become increasingly concerned with how to define and identify interdisciplinarity in research. The task is tricky, since the complexity of interdisciplinary research defies a single definition. Our study tackles this challenge by demonstrating a new typology and qualitative indicators for a...

Sustainability is a word that means different things depending on who is using it, thus underlining the potential problems involved in experts from different fields teaming up to tackle sustainability problems. In this book, Janne Hukkinen argues for a reflexive approach to sustainability as a means of coming to grips with the threatening challenge...

This article addresses the important but overlooked socio-cultural dimension of sustainability indicators. We use cultural theory to assess indicators of human-environment interaction in different cultural contexts in a case study of a mining-industrial complex in the Kola Peninsula, North-West Russia. The analysis yields results with implications...

The intricate relationship between reindeer (Rangifer t. tarandus L.) and humans in the boreal, subarctic and arctic regions has attracted the keen attention of modern sciences since the early 20 th century. Since the 1950s, various scientific traditions have shaped the emergence of separate foci dealing with the natural conditions of the animal an...

We will (1) show that reindeer herders in Finland have a long tradition of entrepreneurship; (2) identify administrative and policy obstacles to fulfilling the entrepreneurial capacities and (3) recommend actions to remove the obstacles to indigenous entrepreneurship among herders. Successful herders in Finland have embraced key entrepreneurial vir...

We studied the emergence of biotechnology in Turku, Finland. First, we analysed it as a result of the interaction between the city and its national and international environment, focusing on the city’s industrial policy as the mediator. Second, we diagnosed the construction of BioCity, the first biotechnology centre building of Turku, as a key even...

The development of environmental indicators is dominated by the so-called pressure–state–response (PSR) model. The PSR contains a set of indicators measuring anthropogenic pressure (P) on the environment, the state (S) of the environment resulting from such pressure, and the societal response (R) to ease the pressure. The strength of the PSR is its...

Ecological economics occasionally makes universal claims about how to understand and measure change in systems of human–environmental interaction. In terms of environmental policy, one of the most influential universal concepts that has come out of the ecological economics literature recently is ecological efficiency (or eco-efficiency). This artic...

Evolutionary Economics (EE), Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) are often seen in literature on technology as alternative ways of accounting for technological change. Superficially they seem to exclude each other because of contradictory understandings of how technology. changes, but in this paper we argue that...

Scenario-making is a common method for anticipating technological and other kinds of futures. This article discusses scenario-making from a methodological point of view. How do we cope with contingency, that is, the problem of not knowing what developmental trajectories in the present will turn out to determine future events? Two distinctions are s...

Scenario-making is a common method for anticipating technological and other kinds of futures. This article discusses scenario-making from a methodological point of view. How do we cope with contingency, that is, the problem of not knowing what developmental trajectories in the present will turn out to determine future events? Two distinctions are s...

The paper argues that eco-efficiency is fundamentally disruptive when promoted as a universal prescription for environmental policy. Eco-efficiency runs against the cognitive and institutional bases of sustainable human–environmental interaction. At the cognitive level, eco-efficiency assumes that an individual's concern for the environment can be...

The method of constructing scenarios is neither straightforward nor unproblematic. We propose first of all the term epistemic closure for representing the necessary methodological limitations of scenario construction. Whenever a particular kind of epistemic closure becomes a habit within some field of scenario-making, we use the term conventional s...

The paper explores environmental institutions that facilitate the trial and error search for sustainable development. The argumentation refers to four case studies of environmental management in the US, Europe, and China. To diagnose the institutional constraints of environmental management, the studies focus on the mental models with which experts...

The paper outlines strategies for participatory research by comparing the results of a participatory workshop on research needs in human‐environmental interaction in Finnish Lapland with an analysis of official Finnish policy documents on the same subject. The workshop was organized in Anár/Inari, Finland in October 1997 as part of the Human Enviro...

This work explores the difficulties of solving contemporary environmental problems within existing global institutions. It questions guidelines set out in recent influential policy reports, and suggests new agendas for sustainability, industrial ecology, and institutional reform. Including case studies from the USA, Europe and China, this book inve...

Institutions are the social rules that guide the design of strategies such as environmental management. Institutions can therefore significantly facilitate or hinder the realization of sustainable development. This paper relies on case studies of long-term waste management in Finland and California to explore institutional arrangements that facilit...

Waste reduction, which is the top priority of waste management in industrialized countries, can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of this study was to improve the capacity of Finnish decision makers to implement long-term waste management policies, such as waste reduction. Focused interviews were conducted in 1992 with 24 resea...

Case studies in waste management are reviewed to assess how successfully long-term considerations have been included in the design and implementation of environmental policy in two European countries with corporatist decision-making institutions, Finland and the Netherlands. Although corporatism, or the institutionalized integration of conflicting...

Environmental issues expose firms to numerous threats from their ecological and institutional surroundings. Many enterprises today react to these threats with technical innovations designed to improve the company's green image and performance. However, the critical test of corporate greening is how effectively the firm deals with the organizational...

This study set out to improve the capacity of Finnish policy makers to design and implement long-term waste management policies. Since policy makers must frequently act on incomplete information and process the information they receive through mental models that can lead to inefficient or myopic choices, the methodological approach was to analyze t...

Cognitive mapping based on interviews with Colorado's water-management officials indicates that institutional factors inhibit the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) from beneficially applying the so-called Interactive Accounting Model (IAM) in the Arkansas River Basin. Modeling confuses the drainage problem and the design of remedial strategies by foc...

Bayesian network analysis was found to be an effective way of avoiding the problems of inconsistent and attitudinal deduction rules that often characterize traditional expert systems. Key experts and decision makers on the management of saline and toxic irrigation drainage in California's San Joaquin Valley have widely different and strongly attitu...

A sociotechnical framework is used to systematically investigate interactions between water agencies and proposed technical solutions to agricultural drainage problems in California's San Joaquin Valley during 1980s. State water officials face the conflicting incentive to reduce uncertainties over drainage treatment and disposal, while avoiding res...

A narrative network analysis of the seeming paralysis of efforts to deal with the problem of toxic elements in agricultural drainage in California's San Joaquin Valley shows irrigation agencies to be caught in a dilemma. Despite pressures to reduce uncertainty about treatment methods, reducing this uncertainty risks increased political polarization...

ISCOVERY of toxics in irrigation return flows has given drainage management a visibility and urgency that D western irrigation agencies are poorly equipped to deal with. Farmers and irrigation officials have struggled with waterlogging and salinization for millennia and generally have enjoyed the public's sympathies in their strife. In contrast, to...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Civil Engineering)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1990. Includes bibliographical references. Photocopy of transcript.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1990. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 543-569). Microfilm.

"Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) has been hailed as an icon in past and present, representing northern people and environment.Whereas the Sami, the aboriginal people of northernmost Europe, see it as their thread of life, both in cultural and economic terms. The neighboring Finns to the South have integrated this animal as another additional element i...