Minna Kaljonen

AgriBMPWater: systems approach to environmentally acceptable farming

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 in a pluridisciplinary approach and framework. The approach developed corresponds to a cost/effectiveness assessment of several BMPs in several European watersheds, also including the study of their acceptability by farmers. Thanks to the integrated assessment of existing and potential BMPs, a selection grid contributes to provide assistance to regulators on how to conduct environmental, economic and sociological analyses for helping decision makers. Water quality problems encountered and dealt with in this project include nitrate, phosphorus, sediment, pesticide loads and acid water concerns. Thus, the developed framework allows for a large range of hydrological and economic models, depending on the environmental problem detected in each watershed.

Divergent Images of Multifunctional Agriculture: A Comparative Study of the Future Images between Farmers and Agri-food Experts in Finland

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 multifunctional agriculture by comparing the perceptions of future agriculture by the Finnish farmers and agri-food experts. For analysing different perceptions we use a concept of future image developed within future studies. The empirical material is collected with a survey. In the analysis we give special attention to the dialectics between desirable and probable futures as well as to the (dis)continuities between the views of the farmer and the expert respondents. On the basis of the descriptive analysis we identify the future challenges of agriculture both in terms of opportunities and threats and discuss their implications for the multifunctionality debate.We close the article by addressing the relevance of future studies for policy formation.

Bringing Back the Lost Biotopes: The Practice of Regional Biodiversity Management Planning in Finland

Abstract 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 management plans in the policy process, we need to reinstate the practices that have produced them. In this article, I analyse experiences gained from Vehmaa, Southwest Finland. I analyse the planning process as a collective experimentation and systematically examine how human and non-human elements associate together in a policy process. By following the actors involved, I analyse how they create associations between heterogeneous elements and create the linkages between individual and collective action. I show how it is the mutability of the plan and its ability to move across the different scales that makes it a powerful device in agri-environmental policy. I argue, however, that regional planning has not been able to challenge the boundary between productive space and nature created by the modern intensive agricultural systems. Although the aim of the planning was to blaze a trail for biodiversity, the associations created around ecologically valuable sites ended up enforcing the rather limited interpretation of biodiversity offered by agri-environmental policy and offered only little capacity for farmers to act. I close the article by situating the case study within a wider context of rural sustainability and discussing possible other ways of associating agriculture, rural livelihood and biodiversity.

‘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.

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.