Maria Ehrnström-FuentesHanken School of Economics · Department of Management and Organisation
Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes
PhD
About
23
Publications
4,716
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
270
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I do research on grassroots organising in relation to sustainability, extractivisms and transformative alternatives. In my PhD I focused on legitimacy creation and the politics of CSR in local communities affected by forestry industry in Chile and Uruguay. Since then I have also researched transformative alternatives working on local food/wool initiatives, degrowth and regenerative farming. I draw on theories on the ontological politics of the land, decoloniality, and STS.
Publications
Publications (23)
The rise of the globalized, industrial food system has widened the distance between producers and consumers. Over the last several years there has been a call for closing the distance between producers and consumers, and for more transparency in food systems. This need can be filled via procurement of local food, but there are often barriers to con...
How does transformative change that restructures humans’ relations to the Earth come into being? The proposal for degrowth calls for a drastic reorganization of societies in order to deal with the current planetary socioecological and climate crises. Yet, there is a lack of understanding of how such socioecological transformations are brought into...
This article examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of political ontology. We contend that CSR is not only a discursive mean of legitimization but an inherently ontological practice through which particular worlds become real. CSR enables the politics of place-making, connecting humans and nonhumans in specific territorial...
This chapter argues for the need to account for ontological differences in research on responsibility and sustainability. Ontological assumptions about "the world" influence what kind of organising activities, and relations to nonhumans (e.g., rivers, mountains, animals) are considered responsible and sustainable and has direct implications for wha...
A quiet revolution is taking place and may increase in force based on the Covid-19 pandemic, as we need to address some wicked problems: the pandemic’s economic consequences alongside the climate and environmental crisis. Based on concrete examples from around the world with a renewed focus on fibres’ environmental footprint and local variation as...
This chapter examines the limits to changing the current economic system through policy measures like green growth and the circular economy. We examine the biophysical aspects of the economy and the huge amounts of materials and energy the global economy consumes to achieve growth. Thus far, governmental responses have been incapable of addressing...
The aim of this paper is to examine how territorial movements, as distinct forms of place-based social movements, organise in defence of life against the threat of resource extraction on their land. Based on the experiences of Indigenous Lafkenche-Mapuche members of a protracted struggle against a pulp mill in southern Chile, the study seeks to add...
The modern industrialized food system has faced criticism for several decades. Since the 1990s, various alternative food networks (AFNs) have attempted to increase the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the food system. A recent innovation in Finland, REKO food rings, was motivated by the desire to enhance the livelihood of farmer...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the politics involved in local struggles against forestry extractivism. The forestry sector is dependent on vast areas of land for tree plantations. This creates deep-rooted conflicts between global corporations that seek access to natural resources and locals whose way of life requires the use of the...
Self-organization is a term that is increasingly used to describe how engaged citizens come together to create sustainable food systems at the local community level. Yet, there is a lack of understanding of what this self-organizing activity actually means. While previous literature has addressed self-organization as an outcome of building consensu...
The experiment consists of 8 loosely connected stories in distinct parts of Finland. These have been recorded and edited into publically available podcasts. The experiment is twofold: 1) make visible the stories of people 'doing transitions' towards more sustainable ways of living to the public. 2) see what happens when people here each other's sto...
This article critically analyses corporate-community relations in the forestry industry, with a particular focus on cases in the Latin American context. The key conceptual focus is on the legitimacy of corporate activity from the perspective of local communities in the contested field of sustainability. The concept of legitimacy is critically discu...
This study examines the role of states in developing contemporary extractivism based on recent investments and project plans in industrial forestry in Uruguay. This sheds light on several unanswered questions related to the role of the state and civil society in the governance, politics, and political economy of extractivism. The role played by sta...
This article critically examines the usability of the concept of ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO) in the Latin American context as an indicator of the social acceptability granted by local stakeholders to multinational forestry companies. We identify four potential problems (risks of co-optation, structural power imbalances, conflicting worldviews...
This study critically examines the concept of political CSR, or legitimacy creation through deliberation, as something that can be universally agreed upon in places where incommensurable differences exist. Through a comparative case study of two local stakeholder groups - one urban and one rural - involved in a conflict over a pulp mill in the sout...
Deliberation is increasingly promoted as a means for producing legitimate decisions in a wide variety of public and private governance schemes. Through a case study of a disputed pulp mill in Chile, the study challenges that assumption by examining what the media representation reveals in terms of how legitimacy is constructed in the public sphere....
Questions
Question (1)
Socioecological transformations seem to be a concept used in degrowth (and marxist) circles to describe the changes that occur as humans and nonhumans interact and impact the ecology which they are part of. What is the concept that is used from a performative /practice oriented approach (e.g. science and technology studies) to deal with systemic change that involves how people connect with the more-than-human world?
