Jarmo Kortelainen

The river as an actor-network: the Finnish forest industry utilization of lake and river systems

Abstract The article analyses how the forest industry has utilized Finnish lake and river systems. One river, the Pielisjoki in eastern Finland, is used as an example. For decades the hegemonic position of the forest industry gave it a free hand to exploit the river as a transport route, a source of energy and a sewer. This was challenged by local actors in an environmental conflict in the late 1980s. The conflict changed the dominant meaning of the river and today the forest industry utilizes the river as a symbol of environmental protection. The paper draws upon an actor-network approach, which considers the river to be a combination of human and non-human actors. This allows it to be seen as a result of both social constructions and natural processes.

Performing the green market—creating space: emergence of the green consumer in the Russian woodlands

The paper explores green markets as relational effects. The aim is to show that the green markets of the forest industry did not develop and expand through green consumption behaviour but were performed by a hybrid set of actors including environmental nongovernmental organisations, publishing companies, certification agencies, market researchers, and critical citizens. The spatiality of greening is expressed by showing how spatial relations, territorial spaces, and spatial differences were created and utilised within the process. Empirically, the focus is on the Russian forest sector. By analysing two examples, a conflict over old-growth forests, and a forest certification process, the study indicates how spatial reorientation and the westward export of the forest industry have resulted in greening timber markets in various parts of the Russian forest peripheries.

Ownership Changes and Transformation of the Russian Pulp and Paper Industry

This paper analyzes recent transformations in the Russian pulp and paper industry, focusing on ownership changes and their effects at the regional and local scales. Russian forest corporations, investment funds, and transnational companies have been purchasing mills and replacing the state as the main agent shaping this sector of the economy. Production figures are presented, main actors identified, recent ownership changes analyzed, and the effects of these processes for mill towns examined. These issues are investigated not only for the Russian Federation, but for three northwestern Russian regions as well: the Republic of Karelia, Leningrad Oblast, and Vologda Oblast. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D21, F21, L73. 4 figures, 60 references.

Boundaries of transnational forest governance in Russia

Abstract The article examines how both the territorial and non-territorial boundaries affect the transnational forest governance. Although being a globalised and transnational feature, present forest governance is shaped, enabled and restricted by various kinds of boundaries. The transnational forest governance is approached as a process which operates through both borderless network-spaces and bounded regional spaces. The article scrutinises empirically how the transnational forest governance has entered the Russian woodlands. The operations of multinational forestry companies, campaigns of transnational ENGOs and systems of forest certification have connected some parts of Russia with novel transnational network-spaces of forest governance. The main argument is, however, that regional spaces and boundaries influence and afford the processes of transnational forest governance in numerous ways.

Positionality Switch: Remapping Resource Communities in Russian Borderlands

abstract This article elaborates on the contested periphery approach and related local models. Some economic geographers argue that the peculiarities of resource peripheries cannot be understood with the help of economic theories designed in economic cores. The contested periphery approach was developed specifically for resource economies and stresses the importance of geographically variable interactions of stakeholder groups that channel broad institutional values (industrialism, regulationism, environmentalism, and aboriginalism) into peripheries. Along with local features, they create local models, and changes in relations occasionally remap the conditions for resource utilization. The contested periphery approach is based on comparisons between large territorial regions, but we argue that this does not provide sufficient tools to recognize the relationally formed heterogeneity of peripheries. Instead, this article focuses on the changing positionalities of local communities. We introduce the concept of positionality switch to highlight the ways abrupt shifts in the direction of relations alter local positionalities. Empirically, we explore two Russian forestry communities in the Finnish-Russian borderland. Cross-border trade connections and the shifting semipermeability of the boundary have greatly influenced the local model and remapped borderland communities. Reestablished timber export in the 1990s began to create a local model shaped by imported forestry technologies and work organization systems. In the 2000s, higher customs duties for wood and deteriorating transportation links cut off both the cross-border and domestic connections leaving the settlements in limbo. The article concludes by arguing that the contested periphery approach and local models should be localized and supplemented with the concepts of positionality and positionality switch as well as contextually relevant concepts because they help to better understand the particularities and specific relations of each local model.

The European Green Belt: Generating Environmental Governance - Reshaping Border Areas

The European Green Belt: Generating Environmental Governance - Reshaping Border Areas The article focuses on the European Green Belt (EGB), which refers to efforts to create a network of conservation areas along the borderline that used to divide Europe into the socialist and capitalist blocks. The EGB initiative attempts to link ecologically valuable areas as continuous ecological networks that cross the entire continent. The EGB is divided into three sub-regions: the Fennoscandian and Baltic Green Belt in the North and along the coastline of the Baltic Sea, the Central European Green Belt, and the South-Eastern European Green Belt. The EGB network is studied as a form of environmental governance, and its formation and furtherance are linked with the environmental governance discussion. In addition, the article aims to show that EGB governance is changing the meaning of the former Iron Curtain borders. The borders have been transnationalised since they have become parts of international networks seeking to develop borderless ecological zones. However, the EGB process maintains and reproduces the borders, as the process itself depends on the availability of suitable border areas.

EU policy on the move – mobility and domestic translation of the European Union’s renewable energy policy

ABSTRACT We discuss how the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive was designed to be mobile, and how it was moved to and implemented in Finland by translating it to enhance wood-based energy production through specific subsidies. We study policy-making as a mobile process, which approach has its original roots in political science and more recent basis in political geography. The article aims to develop conceptual understanding of how the mobility of a supranational policy is generated and how a policy is translated into complex and contentious geographical contexts. We aim to show that mobility of a directive is enabled by an empty governance space which is aimed to be ‘filled in’ in each spatial context, and that the filling in process makes each translation a contentious and path-dependent process. In Finland, the selected policy tools and practices continued the path-dependent ways of favouring forestry industry’s traditional position as the primary utiliser of forest resources.

The EU-Quarter as a political place: Investigating fluid assemblages in EU policy making:

We focus on the European Quarter in Brussels as a political place and the spatial context of European Union (EU) policy making. In addition to the EU institutions, the political place consists of a political agglomeration of various kinds of actors, from EU bureaucrats and politicians to a variety of stakeholders and lobbyists from all over the EU, who are permanently present in the Brussels neighbourhood. We present, firstly, the EU Quarter as a fixed setting for policy making with a relatively constant physical, locational and functional shape, and a specific sense of place as the EU bubble. Secondly, we emphasise the fragmentation and fluidity that portray it as a place divided into various political assemblages that make the place an assemblage of assemblages consisting of smaller and constantly evolving sub-processes. Thirdly, we aim to demonstrate the mobile and geographically distributed nature of EU policy making, and thus the dispersal of the political places where it takes place. This generates mobility of different kinds, which include not only the circulation of political ideas and people between different sites of the EU political system, but also the monthly migration of the Parliament and related lobbyists to Strasbourg. We believe that these three aspects of political place help the understanding of the situated but simultaneously spatially dispersed and mobile nature of EU policy making, and the study of the political places in other urban contexts.