Minna Kaljonen

• Professor
• Senior Researcher at Finnish Environment Institute

The critical role of everyday practices in climate change mitigation has placed experimental approaches at the top of the environmental policy agenda. In this paper we discuss the value of behavioural approaches, practice theories, pragmatic tinkering and speculative thinking with respect to experimentation. Whereas the first two have been much dis...

Just transition is gaining increasing attention. The need to consider social justice in sustainability transitions is finally being acknowledged. Research on this issue has, to date, mainly concentrated on energy systems. In this paper, we examine how the elaboration of dietary transition widens the spectrum of justice questions in sustainability t...

Legumes receive increasing attention in sustainability transition research as they can contribute to more sustainable food systems. Previous research has established the need for policies relating to both production and consumption to tackle the marginalisation of legumes in European cropping systems and diets. In this paper, we apply the policy mi...

Increasing concerns for climate change call for radical changes in food systems. There is a need to pay more attention to the entangled changes in technological development, food production, as well as consumption and consumer demand. Consumer and market interest in alternative meat and milk products—such as plant based milk, plant protein products...

In transformative sustainability science, reflexivity is considered critical for ethically sound and socially relevant research. In practice, many transdisciplinary knowledge co-production processes have faced problems in mitigating power hierarchies among the participating actors and the different types of knowledge. In this paper, we develop and...

Sustainability transitions have often been described to involve ‘disruptions’. However, many writings in this field have been rather imprecise about what disruption means in the context of transitions, beyond the disruption of status quo. In the literature, references to disruptions have ranged from a discourse on disruptive niche innovations (Wils...

Background According to nutrition recommendations, plant-based diets are favorable for both climate and health. However, the adoption of such diets varies between sociodemographic groups. Aims of this study are to examine how large proportions of the population have shifted towards plant-based diets to combat climate change, and to identify perceiv...

Justice in sustainability transitions requires states to design transition policies that ‘leave no‐one behind’. Emphasising fairness, however, may entail slowing or scaling down the impetus of sustainability transition. To examine this risk empirically, we analysed how stakeholders frame justice in deliberating policy measures needed to support jus...

This report assesses the EU policy mix shaping Europe's food system in the light of research into the dynamics and governance of sustainability transitions. The report addresses two core questions. First, is the current EU policy mix governing Europe's food system consistent with the transformative objectives set out in the European Green Deal? Sec...

This special issue builds understanding of just transitions by looking at specific dynamics in food system transitions. The articles in the special issue apply a multi-dimensional understanding of justice, which stress that in addition to distributional matters, also recognition and procedural justice require attention in transitions. The current i...

The need to create more sustainable food systems calls for careful attention to justice in making the transition. However, to achieve a just transition and create policies to support the goal of developing sustainable food systems, we need more knowledge of the ways current policies tackle justice. This knowledge can reveal blind spots and developm...

Sustainability transitions governance needs to be inclusive and participatory and the question of justice is crucial for making effective and acceptable changes possible. But how do we ensure adequate participation in governance processes and enable reconciliation between competing goals in relation to sustainability transitions? Transition managem...

Information on dietary adequacy is needed to assess food and nutrition security in a modern society, especially in the transition towards climate-friendly food systems. In this study, differences in the nutritional adequacy of diets among Finnish adults were evaluated in population groups of different education, income and urbanisation levels. The...

In recent sustainability transitions research, more attention has been called to dynamic relations between regimes and niches in complex processes of systemic change. In this paper, we provide the case of meat alternative markets, which have been expanding rapidly in Europe and in Northern America. During this expansion, animal-free alternatives ar...

In order to maintain a habitable planet, relatively fast and large-scale transitions towards sustainable societies are needed especially regarding the production and consumption of energy. The transitions require people to change the ways they conduct their daily lives as well as agency (capacity to act) in bringing about the needed changes at diff...

Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal...

Because of the urgency of accelerating transitions, we examine the emerging understanding of the concept of ‘disruption’ in the context of sustainability transition studies to critically assess its value, pitfalls and potentials. By conducting a qualitative systematic review of 47 articles, we analyse how disruption is seen in this literature and w...

Shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), developed at global scale, comprise narrative descriptions and quantifications of future world developments that are intended for climate change scenario analysis. However, their extension to national and regional scales can be challenging. Here, we present SSP narratives co-developed with stakeholders for the...

Recent years have seen an increase in actions to address a key feature of food in the Anthropocene: the over‐production and consumption of animal‐based foods or ‘animalisation’ of diets. However, it is unclear whether such efforts can be understood as a coherent institutional level response that will challenge hegemonic dietary biopower, a regime o...

Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond a...

Two streams of literature have become especially prominent in understanding social change toward sustainability within the past decades: the research on socio-technical transitions and applications of social practice theory. The aim of this article is to contribute to efforts to create dialogue between these two approaches. We do this by focusing o...

Reducing meat consumption has become a key concern in attempts to respond to climate change. We explore possibilities to empower collectives of people to reflect on their eating preferences by organizing protein demonstrations for Finnish students aged 10‒16. We analyze the protein demonstrations as public experiments – specific arenas allowing peo...

This study examined what kind of policy instruments and actions are needed for sustainable dietary change and how a large-scale dietary change would impact the climate, thus analysing the economic impacts of transitioning from animal-based diets to alternative plant-based diets. The transition would require the support of horizontal measures that c...

SYKE Policy Brief https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/318838

SYKE Policy Brief

Purpose The critical role of diet in climate change mitigation has raised behavioural approaches to the top of the agenda. In this paper, the authors take a critical look at these behavioural approaches and call for a more dynamic, practice-oriented understanding of long-term changes in sustainable food consumption and supply. Design/methodology/a...

Mitigation of climate change urges to reduce our meat consumption. This necessitates new eating practices and ways of thinking about food. In this paper we discuss how experimentative research can participate in making such changes. We introduce notions of pragmatic tinkering, speculative thinking and ethical discussion and evaluate their contribut...

Livestock breeding is an exercise in value creation: to breed animals, certain individuals must be deemed valuable while others are rendered killable. However, value must be performed again and again to retain its meaning in a network of heterogeneous actors, both human and non-human. Recently, genomic technologies have redefined breeding practices...

The drive towards collaborative governance has raised critical questions about the hidden forms of power practised in consensual planning processes. In the field of water governance, the issue has been analysed in terms that treat power as an intrinsic property of actors or planning settings. Alternatively power is located in the discursive means m...

Local partnerships have long formed the core of European rural policy. Funds have been channelled into projects that support local actors in innovating novel solutions for rural development. Such rural policy model has much in common with the recent interest in experimental environmental governance. In both cases, the partnerships and experiments a...

Promoting sustainable diets through lunch catering: An experiment with climate choice labelling Changes in diets are needed for reaching climate policy targets. In this report, we examine the potentials of climate choice labelling for guiding food choices and providing information about climate friendly food in lunch canteens. We study how customer...

http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/trace/issue/view/3915

Manure is an important resource for agricultural production. Differentiation of production and concentration of manure on particular livestock farms and in certain regions have raised a concern over its sustainable use. Policy programmes state that we need to use manure in a more resource-efficient way. We cannot, however, assume that a change in p...

Vesienhoidon suunnittelussa on kyse eri toimijoiden sitoutumisesta ja sitouttamisesta. Politiikkakielellä puhutaan tahtotilasta, joka yhteisesti määritellään ja jonka saavuttamiseksi päätetään yhdessä ponnistella. Käytännössä ei kuitenkaan ole lainkaan selvää, miten ja missä puitteissa sitoutuminen tapahtuu ja saa merkityksensä. SYKEssä toteutettav...

To an increasing extent, the management of natural resources rests on planning as a means to enhance collaborative deliberation and policy integration. But even before a planning process can start and any joint meeting be held, a lot of organisational and ontological work needs to be done. ‘Plan-ability’ requires the shaping of an analytical and op...

http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=293166&nodeid=15452&contentlan=2&culture=en-US

Using participatory scenario-making has become increasingly common in environmental assessments that aim for policy impact. In this development, ‘social work’ – i.e., construction and usage of the scenarios – has received only a little analytical interest. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap of knowledge by focusing on the construction...

http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-951-44-8376-9

We need a more thorough understanding of the ways in which vertical scales and horizontal networks hang together in tension in order to understand policy failures experienced within agrienvironmental policies in Europe. In this paper I ground this argument with the experiences gained from the implementation of Finnish agri-environmental policy. I b...

In this paper, I tell a story of the making of a regional biodiversity management plan. The plan is one example of the new modes of operation that are being tried out in order to build linkages from individual to collective action in the implementation of agri-environmental policy in Finland. I argue that in order to understand the role of these ma...

An integrated study was carried out in a small Austrian watershed to assess the environmental, economic and acceptability aspects of implementing certain Best Management Practices (BMPs) for nitrogen management. The environmental impact on groundwater pollution by nitrogen was assessed for various BMPs funded by the Austrian programme for environme...

The aim of this article is to describe the background and main elements of the SCENES project (Water Scenarios for Europe and Neighbouring States) together with the approach for selecting, constructing and evaluating water scenarios up to 2050. SCENES is a multi-faceted integrated project that aims to address the complex questions about the future...

Integrating biodiversity conservation objectives to local level practices takes place in rural areas where land and natural resources are managed for multiple functions. Institutional arrangements in these local contexts will necessarily need to adapt to respond to evolving environmental conditions as well as social expectations and opportunities....

One of the main challenges of European environmental policies is to recruit local-level actors to fulfil set targets. This article explores how targets of European agri-environmental policy have been achieved in Finland. It also analyses how implementation practices produce conditions for agri-environmental management and how policy success—or sust...

The AgriBMPWater project has been imagined and built in a pluri-disciplinary approach and framework, with the study of the object 'BMPs' using several disciplines at the same time (hydrology, economy, sociology, geography and agronomy). The knowledge of the object in each discipline is deepened by a fertile multi-field contribution: borders of disc...

The paper focuses on the interplay between policy implementation and heterogeneous everyday social practices that, we argue, finally determine the success of environmental policies. We compare two empirical case studies to show how the targets of international climate policy and the agri-environmental policy of the EU have been achieved in energy p...

To help local regulators mitigate non-point source agricultural pollution and implement environment-friendly agricultural practices, a comparison between different existing or simulated best management practices (BMPs) has been carried out within a pluridisciplinary project called AgriBMPWater (FP5 founded). The project has been imagined and built...

Se reporter à la rubrique « Le collectif auteur » en fi n d'article. Les contacts Pour atteindre les objectifs de protection de la ressource en eau et de restauration de la qualité des milieux aquatiques, l'agriculture doit adopter de bonnes pratiques effi caces sur le plan environnemental, viables sur le plan économique et réalistes quant à leur a...

Pour élaborer des programmes de restauration de la qualité de l`eau tels que prévus par la Directive cadre européenne sur l`eau, les décideurs locaux sont amenés à promouvoir des modifications de pratiques agricoles, souvent prédéfinies par des techniciens. La question qui se pose est de choisir les modifications les mieux adaptées aux problématiqu...

This paper examines the effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) in transport planning in the light of different views of planning: synoptic optimising planning, communicative planning and planning as a social struggle. The analysis uses empirical materials from 17 case studies collected by survey from Member Countries of the Unite...

In the latest reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) the EU has adopted a concept of multifunctional agriculture that should encourage farming to play several roles in society and contribute to the wellbeing of rural areas by managing the countryside and the environment. In this article we analyse the different interpretations of multifunc...

To design the restoration plans requested by the European Water Framework Directive, local regulators need to implement technically designed modifications of farming practices. Their main interest relies on the determination of which modifications are the most appropriate to the local conditions. To help this decision process, a selection grid has...

Vesitalous, vol. 41, nr 3, pp. 36-42, 0505-3838