Metsäsääntely Suomessa ja Venäjällä. Näkökulmia kestävään metsätalouteen

Sustainability is the aim of forest management and forest regulation in many countries. Accordingly, forest management has been steered towards more environmentally friendly methods and new regulatory instruments have been introduced. At the same time, wood trade and forest industry have become a global business. Even if the importance of national forest legislation has not decreased, it has been widely acknowledged that national regulation of forest management is no longer sufficient. The movement of goods does not acknowledge boundaries, even though most negative environmental and social consequences stay in the country of origin of wood and other raw materials. As a partial solution to this dilemma, different kinds of regulations have been developed. Various forest certification schemes and wood trade regulation in the EU (995/2010) are examples of efforts to prevent illegal logging and unsustainable forestry. The Finland-based forest industry is to a varying extent dependent on wood trade from Russia. Especially in the 1990‟s, ethical questions concerning import of wood from Russian old growth forests near the Finnish border were widely discussed. Consequently, forest industry enterprises have developed systems to trace the origin of wood and to buy certified wood from Russia. The aim of the research has been to evaluate Finnish and Russian forest regulations in order to investigate what kind of forest management these regulations enhance, and to what extent ecologically sustainable forest management has been integrated into different forms of regulation. I have examined Finnish and Russian forest regulation in four separate articles based on the topics of the Russian Forest Code, forest certification and other voluntary forest protection measures in Russia, Finnish forest certification and Finnish forest legislation. One objective has been to analyse the roles voluntary forest certification plays in promoting sustainable forest management in different countries. In my research, I have mainly concentrated on ecological sustainability and protection of biodiversity, although other aspects of sustainable forest management have been touched upon in different articles. In the following I shall conclude the findings of my research. When the current Russian Forest Code (2006) was being adopted, the main emphasis was not on ecological issues, but on reorganizing forest governance. The role of ecological requirements was even slightly diminished during the legislative reform. There are, nevertheless, still stipulations aiming at ecological sustainability, such as the division of forests into different forest management categories and various protection zones. In 2000, FSC forest certification arrived in Russia, at present covering already 28 million hectares of forests. The PEFC scheme is now in use as well, but to a much lesser extent. If properly implemented, Russian forest certification schemes clearly improve the level of ecological and social sustainability of forestry in Russia. Certification criteria, however, are partly in conflict with the Russian forest legislation and certified enterprises have been forced to pay fines or to negotiate with forest authorities. This clearly indicates that even if Russian forest legislation has otherwise been liberalized to a certain extent, some significant paternalism still exists. Voluntary, hands-on biodiversity protection measures are not valued, and they are not part of the official protection policies as in many other countries. However, there have been some regional solutions to this dilemma. In the Republic of Karelia forest authorities have approved a set of forest biodiversity protection rules created by a local NGO and a forest industry enterprise. By following these local rules, an enterprise can avoid fines for protection measures. The current Finnish Forest Act was adopted in 1996. It brought forest legislation into a new era as some ecological aspects were integrated into forest legislation. The various soft-law forest management recommendations further increased the level of biodiversity protection. My evaluation of the overall legitimacy of the Finnish forest legislation and forest management paradigm revealed, however, several problematic issues. As part of this study I analysed the history of the current forest management paradigm. This analysis revealed the path dependency which still hinders the protection of biodiversity and clearly decreases the general legitimacy of forest management. Due to several historical reasons only even-structured forest management based on clear cuts has for decades been officially approved in Finland. Due to increasing demands of forest owners the legislation is finally being revised. Yet, the official approval of uneven-structured forest management would not be enough to fully improve ecological, social and cultural legitimacy. The latest ecological theories and knowledge of endangered species should be taken into account in the on-going reform of forest legislation as well as the modernisation. Forest legislation is one of the very few spheres of Finnish environmental legislation where openness and participation are still considered a threat. The first Finnish forest certification scheme, PEFC, was established in 2000. It now covers more than 20 million hectares, about 95% of the forests in Finland. PEFC Finland does not require a higher level of biodiversity protection than the recommendations by Tapio (the Development Centre for Forestry), but certification has unified forest management practices and requires more protection measures than mere forest legislation. The study suggests that in Finland PEFC has not functioned as an instrument which would substantially improve the level of forest management. Rather it has supported the status quo of the forest sector. While the ecological and social responsibility of Finland-based forest corporations was one impetus for this research, I want to conclude that there are problems related to forest legislation and non-state regulation in both Finland and Russia. If an enterprise buying wood from Russia buys only certified wood, and carefully avoids wood coming from high conservation value forests that are either ecologically or socially valuable, it can be claimed to be as sustainably produced as in Finland. However, there must be continuous scrutiny of the circumstances. In Russia, the level of the compliance of certification criteria varies considerably, and there are vast unprotected invaluable forest areas. The utilisation of these areas should not be based on short-sighted decisions or lack of consensus among stakeholders.

Thinking Outside the Box: Enhancing Science Teaching by Combining (Instead of Contrasting) Laboratory and Simulation Activities

The focus of the present work was on 10- to 12-year-old elementary school students’ conceptual learning outcomes in science in two specific inquiry-learning environments, laboratory and simulation. The main aim was to examine if it would be more beneficial to combine than contrast simulation and laboratory activities in science teaching. It was argued that the status quo where laboratories and simulations are seen as alternative or competing methods in science teaching is hardly an optimal solution to promote students’ learning and understanding in various science domains. It was hypothesized that it would make more sense and be more productive to combine laboratories and simulations. Several explanations and examples were provided to back up the hypothesis. In order to test whether learning with the combination of laboratory and simulation activities can result in better conceptual understanding in science than learning with laboratory or simulation activities alone, two experiments were conducted in the domain of electricity. In these experiments students constructed and studied electrical circuits in three different learning environments: laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits), and simulation-laboratory combination (real and virtual circuits were used simultaneously). In order to measure and compare how these environments affected students’ conceptual understanding of circuits, a subject knowledge assessment questionnaire was administered before and after the experimentation. The results of the experiments were presented in four empirical studies. Three of the studies focused on learning outcomes between the conditions and one on learning processes. Study I analyzed learning outcomes from experiment I. The aim of the study was to investigate if it would be more beneficial to combine simulation and laboratory activities than to use them separately in teaching the concepts of simple electricity. Matched-trios were created based on the pre-test results of 66 elementary school students and divided randomly into a laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits) and simulation-laboratory combination (real and virtual circuits simultaneously) conditions. In each condition students had 90 minutes to construct and study various circuits. The results showed that studying electrical circuits in the simulation–laboratory combination environment improved students’ conceptual understanding more than studying circuits in simulation and laboratory environments alone. Although there were no statistical differences between simulation and laboratory environments, the learning effect was more pronounced in the simulation condition where the students made clear progress during the intervention, whereas in the laboratory condition students’ conceptual understanding remained at an elementary level after the intervention. Study II analyzed learning outcomes from experiment II. The aim of the study was to investigate if and how learning outcomes in simulation and simulation-laboratory combination environments are mediated by implicit (only procedural guidance) and explicit (more structure and guidance for the discovery process) instruction in the context of simple DC circuits. Matched-quartets were created based on the pre-test results of 50 elementary school students and divided randomly into a simulation implicit (SI), simulation explicit (SE), combination implicit (CI) and combination explicit (CE) conditions. The results showed that when the students were working with the simulation alone, they were able to gain significantly greater amount of subject knowledge when they received metacognitive support (explicit instruction; SE) for the discovery process than when they received only procedural guidance (implicit instruction: SI). However, this additional scaffolding was not enough to reach the level of the students in the combination environment (CI and CE). A surprising finding in Study II was that instructional support had a different effect in the combination environment than in the simulation environment. In the combination environment explicit instruction (CE) did not seem to elicit much additional gain for students’ understanding of electric circuits compared to implicit instruction (CI). Instead, explicit instruction slowed down the inquiry process substantially in the combination environment. Study III analyzed from video data learning processes of those 50 students that participated in experiment II (cf. Study II above). The focus was on three specific learning processes: cognitive conflicts, self-explanations, and analogical encodings. The aim of the study was to find out possible explanations for the success of the combination condition in Experiments I and II. The video data provided clear evidence about the benefits of studying with the real and virtual circuits simultaneously (the combination conditions). Mostly the representations complemented each other, that is, one representation helped students to interpret and understand the outcomes they received from the other representation. However, there were also instances in which analogical encoding took place, that is, situations in which the slightly discrepant results between the representations ‘forced’ students to focus on those features that could be generalised across the two representations. No statistical differences were found in the amount of experienced cognitive conflicts and self-explanations between simulation and combination conditions, though in self-explanations there was a nascent trend in favour of the combination. There was also a clear tendency suggesting that explicit guidance increased the amount of self-explanations. Overall, the amount of cognitive conflicts and self-explanations was very low. The aim of the Study IV was twofold: the main aim was to provide an aggregated overview of the learning outcomes of experiments I and II; the secondary aim was to explore the relationship between the learning environments and students’ prior domain knowledge (low and high) in the experiments. Aggregated results of experiments I & II showed that on average, 91% of the students in the combination environment scored above the average of the laboratory environment, and 76% of them scored also above the average of the simulation environment. Seventy percent of the students in the simulation environment scored above the average of the laboratory environment. The results further showed that overall students seemed to benefit from combining simulations and laboratories regardless of their level of prior knowledge, that is, students with either low or high prior knowledge who studied circuits in the combination environment outperformed their counterparts who studied in the laboratory or simulation environment alone. The effect seemed to be slightly bigger among the students with low prior knowledge. However, more detailed inspection of the results showed that there were considerable differences between the experiments regarding how students with low and high prior knowledge benefitted from the combination: in Experiment I, especially students with low prior knowledge benefitted from the combination as compared to those students that used only the simulation, whereas in Experiment II, only students with high prior knowledge seemed to benefit from the combination relative to the simulation group. Regarding the differences between simulation and laboratory groups, the benefits of using a simulation seemed to be slightly higher among students with high prior knowledge. The results of the four empirical studies support the hypothesis concerning the benefits of using simulation along with laboratory activities to promote students’ conceptual understanding of electricity. It can be concluded that when teaching students about electricity, the students can gain better understanding when they have an opportunity to use the simulation and the real circuits in parallel than if they have only the real circuits or only a computer simulation available, even when the use of the simulation is supported with the explicit instruction. The outcomes of the empirical studies can be considered as the first unambiguous evidence on the (additional) benefits of combining laboratory and simulation activities in science education as compared to learning with laboratories and simulations alone.

Arpajaislain uudistamisprosessi ja uudistusten vaikutukset rahapelien markkinointiin

Tutkielma kuvaa Suomen arpajaislain muutosprosessia ja sen taustalla olevia tekijöitä sekä muutoksen vaikutuksia rahapelien markkinointiin. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan erityisesti vuoden 2010 arpajaislain uudistusta ja vaikutuksia. Rahapelejä on kohdeltu Europpan Yhteisöjen lainsäädännössä eri tavalla verrattuna muuhun liiketoimintaan eikä siihen ole sovellettu palveluiden vapaan liikkuvuuden periaatetta samassa mittakaavassa kuin muuhun kaupalliseen toimintaan. Rahapelipalveluiden tarjoaminen internetissä on asettanut valtioiden vanhat rahapelimonopolit uusien haasteiden eteen myös lainsäädännöllisesti. Suomessa valtio on lainmuutoksilla pyrkinyt turvaamaan vallitsevan tilanteen, jossa rahapelipalveluiden tarjoamisesta suomalaisille vastaavat tietyt yhtiöt ja yhdistykset yksinoikeudella. Tutkielma pyrkii kuvaamaan tätä prosessia käyden läpi sen syitä ja seurauksia. Erityishuomion kohteeksi on otettu lakimuutosten vaikutukset ulkomaisten rahapeliyhtiöiden mainontaan suomalaisessa mediassa. Lähteinä on käytetty pääasiassa viranomaislähteitä, mutta tutkielmassa on pyritty tuomaan esille myös rahapelialan toimijoiden näkökulmia.

Oletusarvovalinnat ja oletusarvovaikutus

Oletusarvon mukaisella valintavaihtoehdolla tarkoitetaan sellaista valintavaihtoehtoa, jota pidetään valintaa tekevän ihmisen valintana siinä tapauksessa, jos tämä ei aktiivisesti valitse mitään valittavissa olevista valintavaihtoehdoista. Oletusarvovalintoja käytetään nykypäivänä yhä enemmän ja yhä useammissa erilaisissa yhteyksissä. Oletusarvovaikutus tarkoittaa sellaista vaikutusta, joka hankaloittaa rationaalista päätöksentekoa, ja jonka johdosta oletusarvon mukaiseksi valitun valintavaihtoehdon suosio poikkeaa muiden valittavissa olevien vaihtoehtojen suosiosta. Oletusarvon mukaisen valintavaihtoehdon asettajan on mahdollista oletusarvovaikutus huomioon ottaen vaikuttaa lopullista valintaa tekevien ihmisten päätöksiin. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan empiirisesti oletusarvon mukaisten valintavaihtoehtojen suosiota eläkesäästämisen sekä elintenluovutuksen yhteydessä. Oletusarvovaikutuksen esiintymiseen ja sen voimakkuuteen vaikuttavat eri yhteyksissä erilaiset tekijät. Näitä tässä tutkielmassa tarkasteltuja tekijöitä ovat epäsuora kannatus, riippuvuus viitearvosta, markkinametakognitio, vaivannäkö sekä kognitiiviset harhat, joka käsittää omistusvaikutuksen, status quo -harhan ja tappiokammon. Oletusarvon mukaisen valintavaihtoehdon asettaja voi halutessaan pyrkiä myös vähentämään oletusarvovaikutuksen merkitystä lopullista päätöstä tekevien ihmisten päätöksenteolle. Kyseisen valintavaihtoehdon asettajan on myös mahdollista luoda tapauskohtaisesti erilaisia oletusarvovaihtoehtoja käyttäen hyväkseen haltuunsa saamaa informaatiota. Erilaiset oletusarvovaihtoehdot voidaan jakaa massa-oletusarvovaihtoehtoihin ja yksilöllisiin oletusarvovaihtoehtoihin niiden erilaisten ominaisuuksien perusteella. Joissain tilanteissa oletusarvovalinnan käyttöä paremmin toimii kuitenkin lopullista päätöstä tekevien ihmisten pakottaminen aktiiviseen valintaan. Oletusarvovalintaa käytetään toistaiseksi melko vähän myynnin edistämiseksi, vaikka tämä olisi monesti mahdollista verraten helposti. Tutkielman johtopäätöksenä voidaan todeta, että oletusarvon mukaisiksi määriteltyjä valintavaihtoehtoja käytetään tänä päivänä yhä useammin monissa erilaisissa yhteyksissä. Oletusarvovaikutuksen johdosta nämä valintavaihtoehdot kuitenkin eroavat merkittävästi muista valittavissa olevista valintavaihtoehdoista, jolloin tämän tiedostavan oletusarvon mukaisen valintavaihtoehdon asettajan on mahdollista vaikuttaa valintaa tekevien ihmisten päätöksentekoon.

The third transformation of Japan: An institutional narrative on agglomeration economies in abenomics

Objective of the study The aim of this study is to understand the institutional implications in Abenomics in a spatial context, the contemporary economic reform taking place in Japan, which is to finally end over two decades of economic malaise. For theoretical perspective of choice, this study explores a synthesis of institutionalism as the main approach, complemented by economies of agglomeration in spatial economics, or New Economic Geography (NEG). The outcomes include a narrative with implications for future research, as well as possible future implications for the economy of Japan, itself. The narrative seeks to depict the dialogue between public discourse and governmental communication in order to create a picture of how this phenomenon is being socially constructed. This is done by studying the official communications by the Cabinet along with public media commentary on respective topics. The reform is studied with reference to historical socio-cultural, economic evolution of Japan, which in turn, is explored through a literature review. This is to assess the unique institutional characteristics of Japan pertinent to reform. Research method This is a social and exploratory qualitative study – an institutional narrative case study. The methodological approach was kept practical: in addition to literature review, a narrative, thematic content analysis with structural emphasis was used to construct the contemporary narrative based on the Cabinet communication. This was combined with practical analytic tools borrowed from critical discourse analysis, which were utilized to assess the implicit intertextual agenda within sources. Findings What appears to characterize the discourse is status quo bias that comes in multiple forms. The bias is also coded in the institutions surrounding the reform, wherein stakeholders have vested interests in protecting the current state of affairs. This correlates with uncertainty avoidance characteristic to Japan. Japan heeds the international criticism to deregulate on a rhetorical level, but consistent with history, the Cabinet solutions appear increasingly bureaucratic. Hence, the imposed western information-age paradigm of liberal cluster agglomeration seems ill-suited to Japan which lacks risk takers and a felicitous entrepreneur culture. The Japanese, however, possess vast innovative potential ascribed to some institutional practices and traits, but restrained by others. The derived conclusion is to study the successful intrapreneur cases in Japanese institutional setting as a potential benchmark for Japan specific cluster agglomeration, and a solution to its structural problems impeding growth.

Philosophia moralis sive ethica (1656)

Kempen kuusiosaista väitöskirjasarjaa varten painetut alkulehdet. Koostuu nimiöstä, dedikaatiosta ja gratulaatioista.

Meditationes sancti evangelii 1

Arkit: A-B4.

Meditationes sancti evangelii 52

Invokaatio: Deo duce.

Philosophia moralis sive ethica (1662)

Nimiösivulla myös motto: Augustinus ad Maced: Virtus eo pluris aestimanda est, quo plura contemnit.

Åtgärdsprogram för vattenvården i Nyland för åren 2016 – 2021

Åtgärdsprogrammet för vattenvården i Nyland innehåller uppgifter om vattnens status samt om de åtgärder som krävs för att förbättra och upprätthålla yt- och grundvattnens status under förvaltningsperioden 2016 – 2021. Ytvattnens ekologiska status i är svag i synnerhet på de åkerdominerade avrinningsområdena och i Finska vikens kustvatten. Åarnas och älvarnas status försämras särskilt av eutrofiering till följd av diffus belastning, men också av byggande, reglering och uppdämning. Ytvattnens kemiska status i Nyland har till stor del bedömts vara god. Den sämre än goda kemiska statusen beror i huvudsak på de kvicksilverhalter i abborre som överstiger miljökvalitetsnormen. I Nyland finns 21 grundvattenområden som fastställts ha dålig kemisk status. De vanligaste orsakerna till att den kemiska statu-sen försämrats är grundvattnets kloridhalt, lösningsmedel, bekämpningsmedel samt bensintillsatsen MTBE. De sammanlagda kostnaderna för de åtgärder som föreslås i åtgärdsprogrammet är 372 miljoner euro per år. Härav är 351 mil-joner euro grund- och andra åtgärder som ska vidtas med stöd av annan lagstiftning och 20 miljoner euro åtgärder som kom-pletterar vattenvården. Lagstiftningsbaserade, ekonomiska, förvaltningsmässiga och informationsmässiga styrmetoder har presenterats för att främja genomförandet av åtgärderna. Ansvarsområdena och samarbetsparterna för genomförandet av styr-metoderna har fastställts.