Helena Valve

Frame conflicts and the formulation of alternatives: Environmental assessment of an infrastructure plan

The environmental assessment of plans, programs, and policies should serve as an open policy forum where mutual learning among participants takes place. However, problems of communication may occur when the actors cannot agree which alternatives should be examined. It may be unclear what choices the assessment should shed light on. This article studies the conflicts related to the construction of policy alternatives by analyzing the environmental assessment of a transport infrastructure plan. The results indicate that not only the definition of the scope of the assessment task, but also the restrictions of decision-making, are key issues. It is sometimes harder to achieve agreement on freedom of action than to reach consensus about how to assess a particular set of alternatives.

Articulating Scientific Practice with PROTEE: STS, Loyalties, and the Limits of Reflexivity

Scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective, for example, of experts, methods, equipment, and experimental sites. The configuration of the collective shapes the scientific findings, allowing some interactions to become visible and meaningful at the expense of others. PROTEE is a methodology that aims to increase the reflexivity of research and innovation projects by helping to sensitize practitioners to the demarcations their projects enact and to think through how these may affect the relevance of the outcomes. We used PROTEE to structure a series of dialogues with a research project that wanted its findings to make a contribution to the heated debate on transgenic trees. Through this process, the project did indeed become more articulated while we ourselves became engaged with the project in a very particular way, by becoming loyal to it. The dialogues also made the risks that engagement with public debate entails for scientists very apparent. Like us, the scientific project chose its loyalties, but what PROTEE did was to help make these explicit.

Implementation of EU rural policy: is there any room for local actors? The case of East Anglia, UK

The rural policy of the European Union (EU) should incorporate the EU-wide and national principles to various local circumstances and to promote local action. This paper examines the realisation of this goal in a issue transformation process in East Anglia, UK, by focusing on the potential conflict between the regional institutionalisation of EU rural policy and the aims and initiatives of local actors. In particular, it analyses the success versus failure of the programme in generating environmental projects that were to concretise the programme. My results show that a rationale of maximum spending, short time perspectives and a narrow interpretation of economic benefits, as well as hard procedural demands, discouraged the participation of the voluntary sector. As voluntary organisations were also made responsible for mediating between the programme and the local communities, the programme failed in generating local activism.

‘You Only Start Filling in the Boxes’: Natural Resource Management and the Politics of Plan-Ability:

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 operational platform that allows making sense of, and relating to, natural resources and their evolution. Moreover, the setting must be acceptable for those viewed as important collaborators. By focusing on two regional planning processes in Finland, this paper analyses how plan-ability is created and maintained in practice. The results suggest that the planning of natural resource management depends on material arrangements that operate at two levels. Those of the first level enable focusing of analytical sight and deliberation. As a result, a planning object shapes up. However, what emerges is unlikely to stabilise automatically. Further work is needed, and this may happen at the second level of arranging. At this level, acceptance of the object configuration can be enhanced by disconnecting the plan, or parts of it, from the operational core of policy making. Through the ontological work at the two levels, an ordering of actors and concerns develops that has passed the test of plan-ability. The concept points to the experimental nature of planning, inviting attention to the forces and trajectories that condition policy integration and collaborative policy making.

Doing research, creating impact: using ‘PROTEE’ to learn from a genetically modified tree field trial

If a research project is to achieve its intended impacts, it must learn to become sensitive to the public context it implicitly assumes and enacts. This article presents a case study in which we used the perspectives provided by the ‘PROTEE’ methodology to create an opportunity to explore, and to reflect on, the reality in which research on genetically modified trees was expected to make a difference. Identifying potential barriers to persuasive communication brought out additional capacities and limitations of the research strategy. Paradoxically the very same strategic choices which had allowed the research project to claim its policy-relevance ended up undermining its public role. Since PROTEE can help making such contradictions explicit, we claim that it has much to offer to research management. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

GM plants as sources of im/possibility: a developmental systems view of stabilization

This paper generates a heuristic understanding of the stabilization dynamic of genetically modified plants. This heuristic, the paper argues, can provide a fruitful platform for studying the political dimensions embedded in GM plants. Focusing on stabilization is important, because outside laboratories a plant can have an intermediating role only as a cultivar; as something which has integrated into biological processes and human practices. The actual stabilizing entity is not just an object, but a dynamic analogous to what is called a developmental system. The empowering or suppressing consequences of GM plants depend significantly on the qualities of this spatio-temporal order stabilizing; on the “possibility space” it opens up. Moreover, stabilization connects and makes things possible, but it does not do so automatically, predictably – or for everyone. Centralized control may support stability, but it may also increase vulnerability by reducing local possibility space.

SEA Research in Finland

The drafting of the Council of State guidelines on the environmental assessment of plans, programmes and policies (copies available from the author) was based on research and development coordinated by the Ministry of the Environment and the Finnish Environment Institute.

Cosmopolitics of a Regulatory Fit: The Case of Nanocellulose

ABSTRACT Nanocellulose is an organic material envisioned to have the capacity to replace potentially harmful, non-renewable materials such as plastics. Before the material can be utilized commercially within the EU, its safety needs to be officially proven. This is envisioned to happen through the REACH chemicals regulation that controls the market entry of new substances. The regulation proposes concepts to support regulatory discretion and test methods to be used in risk assessments. While so doing, REACH puts forward assumptions pertaining to the critical qualities of innovations. However, when regulation is used to appraise radically new innovations, the assumptions need to be re-evaluated. Yet, analysis of expert accounts suggests that nanocellulose cannot be easily fit into the categorizations and analytical engagements that REACH proposes. For the purposes of a regulatory adoption, the problems are transformed into epistemological issues to be resolved through the incremental closing of knowledge gaps. Some of the key qualities of the material seem not to gain recognition in the regulatory realm that is in the making. At worst, the official strategy may create conditions for risks which the regulation is supposed to eradicate while, at the same time, hindering the development of plastic-substituting solutions.

Power and the material arrangements of a river basin management plan: the case of the Archipelago Sea

ABSTRACT 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 mobilized by the human participants. Drawing from actor-network theory, this paper calls attention to the material arrangements constitutive for the practicing of power in target-driven, consensus-seeking planning. It sets focus on the obligatory passage points and factual closures through which a planning task links, for example, to ecosystems, policy principles and trajectories of governance. In the meantime, some other entities and issues may lose their planning-steering potentiality. As shown by the analysis of a river-basin planning process, the arrangements that end up steering consensus-seeking cannot be treated as merely discursive outputs operating upon a passive non-human reality. Materialities and living processes contribute to the outcome. However, the link is not deterministic. With different means of arrangement, the planning reality can – and, in the studied case, could have – end up different.