David Lazarevic’s research while affiliated with Finnish Environment Institute and other places

Governments are increasingly utilising research and innovation (R&I) policy to foster economic and societal change. Yet, the empirical correlation between these policies and socio-technical transformations remains under-explored. The report investigates this relationship by comparing the Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs) of Austria, Finland and Sweden, initiated under the NextGenerationEU framework post Covid-19. The report finds significant disparities in the content, process and transformative value of the RRPs among these countries. The differences in the content of the national RRPs, and the ability and willingness to seize the opportunity presented by the RRPs to drive transformation, are explained by existing national policy contexts and frameworks. Surprisingly, the role of R&I policy in the RRPs is less important than expected, despite its emphasised importance in literature and political rhetoric. The report further identifies implications for a transformative innovation policy as well as areas for further research.

Knowledge co-production is increasingly referred to as a means to reorganise expert work and generate policy support. Co-production processes bring together diverse expertise to explore environmental problems beyond epistemic or administrative silos. This re-orchestration of knowledge production is seen as critical for the attainment of sustainability transformations. However, little attention has, so far, been given to the ways in which co-production experiments entangle with the settings to which they are introduced. Drawing from the new sociology of testing, we suggest that knowledge co-production experiments can be fruitfully analysed as tests of established policymaking practices. This approach highlights the role of co-production processes as collaborative forms that intervene by re-orchestrating the analysis of policy-relevant relationships. Interviews of actors engaged with two transition arenas shows that the experiments qualified as new forms of expert involvement, sources of ontological disturbance, and as interruptions in policymaking that oscillates around project-based regional development and an environmental conflict. The methodology provides a relational sensitivity to analyse the interplay between co-production experiments and their settings.

Transformative innovation policy (TIP) implies not only new directionality for innovation policy but also rethinking its means and scope. This requires further investigation into the role of horizontal and cross-sectoral policy programmes that may be relevant for upscaling innovation and destabilising regimes. This paper studies the national implementation, in Finland, of the European Union (EU) programme for COVID-19 recovery, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), as an example of a cross-sectoral policy programme. It is of interest, because the EU has set certain conditions related to sustainability transitions for the RRF. Using a transformative policy mix approach, the paper finds that the Finnish RRF Programme lists many policy measures that can be regarded as having a transformative intent. These include upscaling innovative sustainability niches and destabilising existing practices. Yet, we also found that there is a risk that cross-sectoral programmes fail to find overall transformative visions and fund multiple potentially competing technological pathways instead.

Regions and national economies are facing several challenges regarding raw materials. As cities and metropolitan areas are increasingly becoming hubs of economic activity, they may also play a role in addressing raw material challenges. Many eco-industrial parks are not only found in industrial areas but also in urbanised areas the concept of urban symbiosis may offer viable solutions to those challenges. Urban symbiosis builds on urban and regional metabolism and industrial symbiosis, providing a concept and analytical toolkit that can serve to develop strategies to create the more efficient use and circulation of critical raw materials (CRM), enabled by the integration of different and complex systems. This paper aims to review how urban symbiosis of CRMs has been approached and defined in the prior literature and what are the closely related concepts. One of our key interest areas is to understand what kind of roles cities can have in the urban symbiosis. Based on the results, we suggest future research topics such as exploring concrete models of collaboration and new ways of joint value creation in urban symbiosis ecosystems.

This paper analyses how Finland's circular economy policy attends not only to the promotion and acceleration of innovation, but also the reconfiguration of resource intensive systems. Socio-technical transitions research has historically focused on niche innovation processes. Yet recently, increasing attention has been placed on policy processes that seek to destabilise and disrupt incumbent systems and practices. Furthermore, the social justice aspects of system phase out policies have been brought to the fore. Our qualitative analysis of Finland's circular economy policy programme draws upon the transformative innovation policy and sustainability transitions policy-mix literatures, extending the transformative outcome framework to include outcomes related to the repercussions of regime destabilisation, coordination and tilting the socio-technical landscape. Our analysis shows that Finland's circular economy policy programme aims predominantly at niche stimulation and acceleration, with little emphasis on the regime destabilisation or coordination. Overall, the policy proposals aim toward a strategy of progressive system change, an orientation shaped by the country's corporatist approach to policy making and pre-existing plans.

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 developing toolkits and attempting to shift planning practice by applying evidence-based policy-making processes. In this paper, we ask what happens when sustainability visions are exposed to planning practices, and vice versa, by developing an analytical framework to discuss processes of territorialization and mobilization. We draw lessons from two contextually differing case studies in Finland; on the evaluation of spatial planning processes for the circular economy and a strategic planning intervention for the blue bioeconomy. The disparate cases show that the planning process act as a bidirectional intermediary space, refining both the general transition visions and established planning practices.

In the craft brewing industry, kegging solutions have changed dramatically in recent years. While steel kegs once dominated the draught beer market, single-use plastic kegs have increased in popularity due to their convenience, especially in the craft brewing sector. With the increasing importance of the circular economy and the introduction of policies in Europe to move away from single-use plastic systems, this study aims to assess and compare the sustainability of conventional steel and single-use plastic kegs. The environmental and economic performance are assessed through life cycle assessment and life cycle costing approaches. The results suggest that steel kegs have better environmental performance and life cycle costs. However, these are limited to the local markets, and with larger distances, plastic kegs may become the better option due to their lower weight, suggesting that both kegs are useful in certain situations. This is especially important in countries that have long distances between breweries and their markets. The importance of extending the lifetime of the keg fleet is also highlighted to improve the environmental performance as the results are influenced by the assumption on the lifetime of the steel kegs. To improve the environmental performance of plastic kegs, efficient closed-loop recycling systems should be developed. Careful decision-making is needed to ensure that more sustainable packaging options are chosen for draught beer and that sustainability aspects be taken into account beyond convenience.

Environmental policies often leave room for case- or region-specific discretion. In this paper, we focus on the transformation of socio-material settings into objects of policy discretion. This move calls for manipulation—ontological work—enabling settings to be connected to policy aspirations. The settings become configured in terms of their professed policy-relevant dimensions. The outcomes affect how environmental liabilities become defined in policy processes. The paper develops a conceptual toolkit to analyse ontological work as it is performed by policy documents. We use the toolkit to analyse three types of policy documents defining how agricultural nutrient loading is to be reduced in the Finnish region of North Savo. The findings show that regulatory decisions and policy recommendations are, to a significant extent, outcomes of ontological work. Environmental liabilities are shaped by the ways ‘unstable junctures’ are brought into being. By these junctures we refer to the points in the configured policy landscapes where choices influential for water protection are, according to the documents, to be made. The documents also generate exclusions that narrow down what liability implies in the unstable junctures. Without a focus on the ontological work and emerging ordering effects, it would have been difficult to show how environmental liabilities became (un)defined in the policy documents. The approach is needed to understand how power is practiced in policy processes and how policy instruments come to have consequences.