Aika ennen aluepolitiikkaa. Pohjoisen kehityshankkeet ja alueiden kehittämisen idea 1950-luvun Suomessa

The dissertation focuses on the recognition of the problems of uneven regional development in Finland in the 1950s, and the way the idea of controlling this development was introduced to Finnish politics. Since it is often stated that Finnish regional policy only began in the mid-1960s, the period at hand is considered to fall in the time before regional policy. However, various ideas, plans and projects of regional development as well as different aims of development were brought forward and discussed already in the 1950s. These give an interesting perspective to the ideas of later regional development. In the 1950s, many Finnish politicians became more conscious of the unavoidable societal change. The need for overall modernisation of the society made it reasonable to expect a growing level of unemployment and eagerness to migration. The uneven distribution of well-being was also feared to cause discontent and political changes. International experience proved interfering in the regional development possible when using the argument of public interest ; the measures taken increased the level of well-being, helped sustain societal balance, and supported national economy. Many of the development projects of the 1950s focused on Northern Finland, the natural resources of which were considered an important reserve and the political climate of which was regarded unstable. After the late 1940s, regional development was discussed frequently both on the national and the regional level. Direct and indirect support was given to less developed areas and the government outlined thorough investigations in order to relieve the regional problem. Towards the end of the decade, the measures taken were already often connected to the idea of equality. In the 1950s the conflicts within and between the largest Finnish political parties significantly affected the decisions of regional development. There are three case studies in this qualitative research based on the narrative method. The case studies clarify the characteristics of the 1950s regional development. In the first one, the representatives of the northern region and the state first discuss the location of a state-run nitrogen fertilizer factory and later the location of a new university. In the second, the aims and perspectives of private entrepreneurs and the state collide due to ideas of statist industrialisation projects and later due to an idea of a tax relief targeting northern industry. In the third case, the main role is given to the changing rural areas, in relation to which societal development and urbanisation were often measured. The regional development of the 1950s laid groundwork for the new, more established regional policy. The early problem solving actions were aimed both at the prevailing situation and the future and thus showed the way for the upcoming actions. Regional development policy existed already before regional policy.

The Politics of Surveillance and Response to Disease Outbreaks: The New Frontier for States and Non-state Actors

The capacity to conduct international disease outbreak surveillance and share information about outbreaks quickly has empowered both State and Non-State Actors to take an active role in stopping the spread of disease by generating new technical means to identify potential pandemics through the creation of shared reporting platforms. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of infectious disease surveillance, the concept itself has received relatively little critical attention from academics, practitioners, and policymakers. This book asks leading contributors in the field to engage with five key issues attached to international disease outbreak surveillance - transparency, local engagement, practical needs, integration, and appeal - to illuminate the political effect of these technologies on those who use surveillance, those who respond to surveillance, and those being monitored.

The politics of disease surveillance

The capacity to conduct international disease outbreak surveillance and share information about outbreaks quickly has empowered both State and Non-State Actors to take an active role in stopping the spread of disease by generating new technical means to identify potential pandemics through the creation of shared reporting platforms. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of infectious disease surveillance, the concept itself has received relatively little critical attention from academics, practitioners, and policymakers. This book asks leading contributors in the field to engage with five key issues attached to international disease outbreak surveillance - transparency, local engagement, practical needs, integration, and appeal - to illuminate the political effect of these technologies on those who use surveillance, those who respond to surveillance, and those being monitored.

Connecting people and ideas from around the world: global innovation platforms for next-generation ecology and beyond

We present a case for using Global Community Innovation Platforms (GCIPs), an approach to improve innovation and knowledge exchange in international scientific communities through a common and open online infrastructure. We highlight the value of GCIPs by focusing on recent efforts targeting the ecological sciences, where GCIPs are of high relevance given the urgent need for interdisciplinary, geographical, and cross-sector collaboration to cope with growing challenges to the environment as well as the scientific community itself. Amidst the emergence of new international institutions, organizations, and meetings, GCIPs provide a stable international infrastructure for rapid and long-term coordination that can be accessed by any individual. This accessibility can be especially important for researchers early in their careers. Recent examples of early-career GCIPs complement an array of existing options for early-career scientists to improve skill sets, increase academic and social impact, and broaden career opportunities. We provide a number of examples of existing early-career initiatives that incorporate elements from the GCIPs approach, and highlight an in-depth case study from the ecological sciences: the International Network of Next-Generation Ecologists (INNGE), initiated in 2010 with support from the International Association for Ecology and 20 member institutions from six continents.

What might GeoHumanities do? Possibilities, practices, publics, and politics

This article draws together seven practitioners and scholars from across the diffuse GeoHumanities community to reflect on the pasts and futures of the GeoHumanities. Far from trying to circle the intellectual wagons around orthodoxies of practice or intent, or to determine possibilities in advance, these contributions and the accompanying commentary seek to create connections across the diverse communities of knowledge and practice that constitute the GeoHumanities. Ahead of these six contributions a commentary situates these discussions within wider concerns with interdisciplinarity and identifies three common themes—possibilities practices, and publics—worthy of further discus- sion and reflection. The introduction concludes by identifying a fourth theme, politics, that coheres these three themes in productive and important ways.

The Politics of Pulp Investment and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST)

The Politics of Pulp Investment and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) The paper industry has been moving more heavily to the global South at the beginning of the 21st century. In a number of cases the rural populations of the global South have engaged in increasingly important resistance in their scuffle with the large-scale tree plantation-relying pulp investment model. The resistance had generally not yet managed to slow down Southern industrial tree plantation expansion until 2004. After all, even the MST, perhaps the strongest of the Southern movements, has limited power in comparison to the corporations pushing for plantation expansion. This thesis shows how, even against these odds, depending on the mechanisms of contention and case-specific conflict dynamics, in some cases the movements have managed to slow and even reverse plantation expansion. The thesis is based on extensive field research in the Brazilian countryside. It outlines a new theory of contentious agency promotion, emphasizing its importance in the shaping of corporate resource exploitation. The thesis includes a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of resistance influence on the economic outcomes of all (14) Brazilian large-scale pulp projects between 2004-2008. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that corporate resource exploitation can be slowed down more effectively and likely when the resistance is based on contentious agency. Contentious agency is created by the concatenation of five mutually supporting mechanisms of contention: organizing and politicizing a social movement; heterodox framing of pulp projects; protesting; networking; and embedding whilst maintaining autonomy. The findings suggest that contentious agency can slow or even reverse the expansion of industrial plantations, whereas when contentious agency promotion was inactive, fast or even unchecked plantation expansion was always the outcome. The rule applied to all the assessed 14 pulp conflict cases. The hypothesis gained strong support even in situations where corporate agency promotion was simultaneously active. In previous studies on social movements, there has been a lack of contributions that help us understand the causal mechanisms of contention influencing economic outcomes. The thesis answers to the call by merging a Polanyian analysis of the political economy with the Dynamics of Contention research program and making a case for the impact of contentious agency on capital accumulation. The research concludes that an efficient social movement can utilize mechanisms of contention to promote the potential of activism among its members and influence investment outcomes. Protesting, for example via pioneering land occupations, seemed to be particularly important. Until now, there has been no comprehensive theory on when and how contentious agency can slow down or reverse the expansion of corporate resource exploitation. The original contribution of this research is to provide such a theory, and utilize it to offer an extensive explanation on the conflicts over pulp investment in Brazil, the globalization of the paper industry, and slowing of industrial plantation expansion in the global South.

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights : A comparative analysis of the conceptual relationship between democracy and rights in contemporary political theories

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights is a research in normative political theory, based on comparative analysis of contemporary democratic theories, classified roughly as conventional liberal, deliberative democratic and radical democratic. Its focus is on the conceptual relationship between alternative sources of democratic legitimacy: democratic inclusion and liberal rights. The relationship between rights and democracy is studied through the following questions: are rights to be seen as external constraints to democracy or as objects of democratic decision making processes? Are individual rights threatened by public participation in politics; do constitutionally protected rights limit the inclusiveness of democratic processes? Are liberal values such as individuality, autonomy and liberty; and democratic values such as equality, inclusion and popular sovereignty mutually conflictual or supportive? Analyzing feminist critique of liberal discourse, the dissertation also raises the question about Enlightenment ideals in current political debates: are the universal norms of liberal democracy inherently dependent on the rationalist grand narratives of modernity and incompatible with the ideal of diversity? Part I of the thesis introduces the sources of democratic legitimacy as presented in the alternative democratic models. Part II analyses how the relationship between rights and democracy is theorized in them. Part III contains arguments by feminists and radical democrats against the tenets of universalist liberal democratic models and responds to that critique by partly endorsing, partly rejecting it. The central argument promoted in the thesis is that while the deconstruction of modern rationalism indicates that rights are political constructions as opposed to externally given moral constraints to politics, this insight does not delegitimize the politics of universal rights as an inherent part of democratic institutions. The research indicates that democracy and universal individual rights are mutually interdependent rather than oppositional; and that democracy is more dependent on an unconditional protection of universal individual rights when it is conceived as inclusive, participatory and plural; as opposed to robust majoritarian rule. The central concepts are: liberalism, democracy, legitimacy, deliberation, inclusion, equality, diversity, conflict, public sphere, rights, individualism, universalism and contextuality. The authors discussed are e.g. John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Holmes. The research focuses on contemporary political theory, but the more classical work of John S. Mill, Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt is also included.

The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker

The Russian mathematician, academician and former dissident Igor Shafarevich (b. 1923) is commonly mentioned in Western scholarly studies on perestroika and post-perestroika-era Russian politics as one of the most notable anti-Semites and extreme nationalists of the country. This notoriety owes to Shafarevich’s old samizdat article Russophobia, which was published in 1988. The scandal surrounding Russophobia came to a head when the president of The National Academy of Sciences in the United States asked Shafarevich, its honorary member, to resign. Nothing like this had ever happened in the academy’s history. The present dissertation discusses Shafarevich’s political activities, his texts and ideas as well as their reception. Particular attention is given to Russophobia, whose detailed examination proves very clearly that its reputation as an anti-Semitic text is groundless. The reasons for Russophobia’s hasty but fierce condemnation were many, but only one was that when the Soviet system began to tumble, it was commonly assumed that a vigorous rise in anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism in the Soviet Union/Russia would be just a matter of time. Many observers were highly sensitised to detecting its signs and symptoms. The dissertation also shows that most of those to write the first criticisms of Russophobia and to liken Shafarevich to the ideologues of Nazi Germany were the same people he had criticised in Russophobia for their deterministic view of history and irrational manner of connecting things for the purpose of fanning the flames of distrust between Russia’s Jews and Russians. In retrospect, it is fairly evident that Shafarevich actually managed to effectively “neutralise” the message of many of those obsessed with the Jews among his Russian contemporaries and contributed to the fact that anti-Jewish sentiments have been a great deal less popular in post-communist Russia than so many had feared and expected. The thesis also thoroughly discusses Shafarevich’s other texts and activities before Russophobia’s appearance and after it. In the 1970s, Shafarevich was one of the best-known dissidents in the Soviet Union. He worked together with academician Andrei Sakharov in a dissidents’ unofficial human rights committee and co-operated closely with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn’s exile. Then, during the chaotic years of perestroika, Shafarevich defended the basic rights of ordinary citizens and warned that the hype concerning democracy could become counterproductive if the most palpable result of the reforms was the disappearance of citizens’ basic security and elementary social justice. One of the conclusions of the thesis is that even if the world around Shafarevich has changed considerably, his views have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Persistence is fertile: Pushing methodological potentialities in education research

As more is known about contemporary cultural shifts and the effect this has on the young, research must consider how children operate as global citizens. Children are innocent and vulnerable, but also actively participate in the world; research into early childhood must therefore refine ideas and conceptions and develop research methodologies that see children as superdiverse young citizens. Intergenerational collaborative drawing, which involves adult researchers and children drawing together, is a method that supports superdimensions. A group of researchers tested the method to consider the politics of research, particularly when researcher neutrality and the conventions around gathering ‘unsullied’ data are challenged.

Curious hybrids: Creating 'not-quite' beings to explore possible childhoods

Communications between adults and young children can expose different ideas and opinions. Adults and children have different capacities to speak, these discursive spaces can become filled with assumptions, stereotyping and conventional thinking about power and agency. If communication shifts away from the purely discursive, what might be exposed about the explorations, investigations and fantasies adults and children indulge in? Some time ago my young daughter obsessively drew hybrid beings. Created from mixtures of animal, object, human and creature forms, these beings, which are ‘not-quite’, are becoming, able to transform via myriad mutations. We agreed to collaborate and draw additional hybrid beings to experiment with becoming-other through complex entanglements of forms, to complicate, morph and (trans)form from our human selves to hybrid others. The ‘not- quite-ness’ of our monstrous hybrids subvert the conventions of ‘being’ and prompt contemplations about childhood subjectivities, identities, conventionalities and actively interrogate the assumptive knowledges and subjectifications that are held about young children in early childhood professional and academic systems.

The politics of foreign aid: A median voter perspective

The paper presents a model where the median voter in the donor country determines the support of foreign aid. It is first established that an individual in the donor country is affected by the direct benefits (due to altruism) and costs (due to taxes) of giving aid, and by the indirect benefits or costs of a change in the terms of trade. Then it is shown that the latter effect works through changing both the donor country's average income and its distribution of income. Given the stylized facts of a capital-abundant donor country and relatively capital-poor median voter, it is shown how redistribution-of-income effects soften the impact of terms-of-trade changes on the political support for foreign aid.

Luonnonsuojelu arjessa : Maanomistajien näkemyksiä ja kokemuksia yksityismaiden tilapäisestä luonnonsuojelusta ja sen uudistumisen prosessista

Nature conservation in everyday life: Private landowners perceptions of and experiences on temporary nature conservation and its renewing process This study explores the legitimacy of official nature conservation of private lands. It describes how temporary nature conservation became a part of Finnish nature conservation policy and how forest owners perceived this tool and its usage. In addition, the study analyses forest owners' attitudes on official nature conservation. The study combines individual and official perspectives, and presents a nature conservation politics of everyday life. The theoretical background of the study is learning processes of environmentally responsible participation, and especially empowerment. Main methods in gathering the material for the study have been interviews and a survey. In the 1990 s, Finnish landowners opposed the implementation of nature conservation, especially conservation of shores and the establishment of the European-wide network of conservation areas (Natura 2000). After negative experiences on these conservation efforts, some private landowners were disempowered and some even rejected conservation completely. The Nature Conservation Act of 1996 launched an option to conserve nature officially for fixed time-periods. Use of such a policy tool did not immediately become a widely-used and appreciated conservation practice. During the following decade, however, it attracted remarkable attention within Finnish nature conservation policy discussions. The perspective of landowners began to be emphasised when local and regional organisations for nature conservation and forestry together defined the ideas of natural values trading. Later, the national governance process of the committee defining the Forest Biodiversity Programme for Southern Finland (METSO) institutionalised these ideas in one of its pilot projects. Landowners participated in the project of natural values trading by offering their forests for conservation, which reflects the increased acceptance and legitimacy of nature conservation on private forests. The central elements producing the legitimacy of natural values trading have been voluntariness, temporariness, and dialogue between nature conservation and forestry. Natural values trading analysed in the study is an example of new environmental policy instruments and its creation process represents governance in the implementation of nature conservation. It has increased the legitimacy of nature conservation policy of private forests in Finland. The results reveal the importance of participation and learning processes in the implementation of nature conservation policy, and the need to also pay attention to these processes in the future.

Teaching about deliberative politics: Case studies of classroom–community learning projects in four nations

Theories of deliberative politics position grass-roots community members as more than spectators of politics, and instead recognize their capacity for political engagement by discussing and evaluating options in order to make decisions about issues affecting community life. The processes and products of journalism can assist deliberative politics by providing community members with information resources that are vital for understanding the root causes of problems, weighing up competing claims, forming networks around shared concerns, reaching decisions and undertaking action. This article presents the findings of case studies of four community–classroom projects--one each from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and South Africa--that develop the capacity of journalism students to be effective contributors to deliberative politics. The research points to the importance of learning activities that prepare students to work in diverse communities, map significant community places and structures, identify leaders and stakeholders, engage in respectful dialogue about problems and perspectives, and appreciate community frames and values.

A big idea transmitted pathetically

'A big idea transmitted pathetically' was an exhibition comprising a series of drawing works. These works employ a feminist engagement with the ‘big ideas’ of conceptual art, and enact a ‘redrawing’ of these texts to replay and reveal the complexities of gender politics, representation and language. These works were developed and presented for Bus Projects, Melbourne in 2012.