perjantai 13. lokakuuta 2017

Metsänomistajat voisivat edistää luonnon monimuotoisuutta nykyistä aktiivisemmin – metsiä ei voi pelastaa pelkällä suojelulla

Nykyiset metsäluonnon suojelukeinot keskittyvät turvaamaan uhatuksi joutunutta mutta vielä säilynyttä eliölajistoa niin luonnonsuojelualueilla kuin talousmetsien sisältämissä tärkeissä luontokohteissakin. Mikäli luonnon monimuotoisuuden taso halutaan nykyistä korkeammaksi, katseiden on kuitenkin kohdistuttava normaalissa talouskäytössä olevien metsien tarjoamiin mahdollisuuksiin paljon tätä laajemmin. Metsien hallinnan ja hoidon innovaatioille on siis entistäkin suurempi tilaus.

Talousmetsät tarjoavat puuntuotannon ohella suuren joukon muitakin liiketoimintamahdollisuuksia. Metsien monikäyttö on myös yleisesti tärkeä luonnonsuojelun perustelu ja mahdollistaja. Tämä siitä huolimatta että juuri metsien talouskäytön nykyinen malli on pitkälti syypää niiden monimuotoisuuden vähenemiseen.

Metsänomistajat ovat usein yksityisiä ihmisiä tai perikuntia, ja juuri heidän metsissään luonnonvarojen hallinta ja aktiiviset metsänhoidon toimenpiteet voisivat lisätä luonnon monimuotoisuutta nykyistä paljon enemmän. Vaikka talousmetsät toki tuottavat jo nyt monenlaisia aineellisia ja aineettomia hyödykkeitä, pidemmällä aikavälillä tämä ei kuitenkaan riitä. 

Vapaaehtoiseen luontoarvojen suojeluun on olemassa keinoja ja kannustimia, ja myös metsän- ja luonnonhoidon ohjeistukset kehittyvät koko ajan siihen suuntaan, että metsien moninaiset arvot voidaan ottaa paremmin huomioon. Kaikkea tätä tutkitaan jatkuvasti, ja kasvava tietomäärä on ainakin teoriassa yhä paremmin päättäjien, hallinnon, yritysten ja yksittäisten kansalaisten saatavilla.

Toistaiseksi metsien moninaisia arvoja hyödynnetään lähinnä kasvavilla matkailu-, hyvinvointi- ja luonnontuotealoilla. Harva jos yksikään yritys kuitenkaan voi investoida suoraan luonnon monimuotoisuuden aktiiviseen lisäämiseen edes omilla maillaan saati sitten muiden omistamilla metsäalueilla. Luonnon ihmisille tuottamat hyödyt eli ekosysteemipalvelut nähdäänkin edelleen annettuina hyötyvirtoina, joiden aktiivinen edistäminen hoitotoimenpiteillä ei tuota suoraan mitattavia ja näin investoinnit perustelevia liiketaloudellisia hyötyjä. Sama koskee luonnon monimuotoisuutta yleisemminkin. 

Millaisilla hallinnan keinoilla ihmiset sitten saataisiin hoitamaan metsiään ei ainoastaan monimuotoisuus huomioiden vaan sitä aktiivisesti lisäten? On keksittävä miksi metsänomistaja haluaisi sijoittaa rahansa tai työpanoksensa tällaiseen.
 
Alkuperäinen: Kuka.io -- Heitto
Verkossa: https://www.kuka.io/heitto/uszivlxmcgbk

maanantai 2. lokakuuta 2017

Fish farming and the bioeconomy

Finnish fish farming operates in a controversial business environment. Earlier environmental harms still affect the industries reputation, and the current environmental regulation makes it hard to initiate or scale up production. Yet consumers, following environmentally sound dietary recommendations, would like to have more domestic fish on their plate. The current supply of domestic farmed fish does not meet the demand for it.
 
Recent conceptual innovations may help to reconcile this gap between domestic supply and demand. The circular economy and the bioeconomy are popular concepts that may have significant potential in this regard. In a circular economy, the production of goods, services and value becomes a continuum where waste, side-streams and emerging positive and negative potential (risks) are transformed back into production, i.e. the life-cycles of several materials and processes are embedded. The circular economy utilises its own waste products and feeds itself.
 
In Finland, several recent institutional innovations are encouraging fish farming towards a circular economy model. With the use of Baltic Sea Feed, the environmental load of fish farming is compensated by producing feed from lower value fish harvested from the Baltic. Also, with the Spatial Location Plan, fish farming facilities are located in areas where the environmental condition of the water is most suitable and the technical-economic preconditions are met. These innovations mean that the level of production can increase while the environmental load decreases. The environment, fishers, fish farmers and the domestic fish market benefit.
 
The bioeconomy is a parallel concept to the circular economy. Renewable natural resources are used to produce food, energy, and other products and services. The bioeconomy decouples the dependence of the economy from fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. This helps to prevent the decrease of biological diversity and promotes economic growth in sync with the principles of sustainable development. In the bioeconomy, natural resources are not wasted either, they are used responsibly and are effectively recycled.
 
However, the circular economy and the bioeconomy do have their differences. The circular economy uses engineering science to measure flows of materials and energy, and seeks to identify technological, social and institutional bottlenecks, as well as barriers and path-dependencies that must be overcome. The bioeconomy on the other hand is a wider concept. If one wants to characterise the bioeconomy with a flow-metaphor, it is a river that flows upstream. The growth of the bioeconomy builds on dissipative structures, i.e. actual and potential arrangements that sustain and develop themselves according to the invested energy and work. The bioeconomy is always an open system, far from equilibrium, which is not necessarily true of the circular economy.

In the bioeconomy, new arrangements are always co-created between different actors. For example, pre-negotiations between a (start-up) fish farmer and environmental permit administrator about the requirements of environmental assessment is a step towards the co-created bioeconomy. Entrepreneurial activities and the permit administration both benefit from such reflexive practices in business governance. Recently developed local co-operation groups are another example where good governance, fish farming activities and the environmental quality control may meet. It is hoped that these groups can co-create long-term solutions to mitigate the effects of aquaculture on the Great Cormorant populations in coastal areas in Finland.
 
Quite obviously, market-based solutions do not necessarily support the bioeconomy. For example, in the fisheries sector, vessel-specific fishing rights provide an opportunity for negotiation between fishing enterprises, but the can also affect small-scale artisanal fishing and harmfully impact fishing culture and social cohesion. However, the use of Baltic Sea Feed in fish farming may have positive synergies and benefit coastal cultures. Perhaps it is best to consider the bioeconomy as a multidimensional material and immaterial growth process, aiming to produce plural economies, protect nature and ensure benefits and costs are equitably shared.

Long-term bioeconomic solutions require upstream, bottom-up activism, that produces innovative structural and functional architectures for individual, social and collective action. As we have witnessed in Finland, the recent developments in fish farming are built on a combination of business, environmental, social and policy entrepreneurial creativity. The government is not an outsider to these developments. It has taken an active role in supporting the testing of novel arrangements in order to find those that work best. The blue bioeconomy and its governance are now poised to co-evolve towards a sustainable future.
 
Originally: ESEE Autumn 2017 newsletter – Hot Topic by Juha Hiedanpää
Published online: http://www.euroecolecon.org/newsletter/

maanantai 6. helmikuuta 2017

Of co-creation

Institutional design and policy implementation do not always produce the results that were the reason for their initiation and they never produce only the intended results, but a multitude of consequences, some of which are beneficial to the original goal and some of which are not. The tendency is that the situations grow more complex. The grey wolf policy in Finland is one example. Despite the recent bottom-up institution building and policy implementation (Anon, 2015), the negative surprises tend to appear and bring the problematic situation close to square one again: where the conflict is intense and the wolf protection harder. These setbacks are due to many causes and reasons -- sometimes to problematic managerial actions, interest group reactions or a combination thereof.

Sometimes the situations like this are called wicked. I would rather call them a problematic situation. Friedrich von Hayek (1982, 37) has already reminded us that realisations are always surprising and emerging societal structures, order and results are due to human actions, but not all of them are due to human design. The late Ulrich Beck (2016) was of a similar opinion as he emphasised the role and significance of side-effects in institutional adjustment and in the growth of societies. For him, the governmental goals are, in fact, reactions to the side-effects of previous attempts to control side-effects. This is a peculiar feature of institutional evolution.

This realisation-oriented policy making is slowly gaining ground from transcendental institutionalism. According to Sen (2009, 5-6), the political desire to set institutions right transcendentally has two features: “First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justices and injustice… Second, in the search for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on getting institutions right, and it is not directly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge”.

The realization-orientation principle is close to the pragmatic maxim by Charles S. Peirce (CP5.402): “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”. Realizations, i.e., effects, do not appear spontaneously, without human intention and design, they appear in complex transactions from within the ecostructure already in place but change due to these very same transactions. Realisations are co-created.

Understood from this view, institutional adjustments and policy designs are what their conceived effects ultimately become - the policies are only as good as their co-created effects. As Sen reminds us, those who focus on realizations and who are engaged in making comparisons from the point of view of real-life consequences are more often interested in identifying and solving practical policy problems leading to these injustices. The realisation-orientation calls for coordinated co-creation of policy designs and implementation.

The idea is not as old as it first seems. In co-construction, people are invited to participate in policy planning, agenda setting and, say, evaluation of ongoing policy processes, but they do not participate in implementation.  In co-production, people take part in data collection, but they do not necessarily participate in any other parts of the knowledge production process, i.e., in defining research problems or in executing analysis and, especially, not in weighting societal policy problems and potential solutions. In co-design, people participate in policy instrument development, but again there are no guarantees that the engagement and collaboration meaningfully extends from the early phase of the policy cycle to any point further. 

These three forms of public involvement may, of course, produce wonderful practical effects but there is one feature that makes them different from the approach of co-creation. The three approaches do not walk the participants all the way to effects; they do not engage people until the intended policy outcomes and emerged side-effects, some of which are mutually valued and some of which may not be.

In his cosmology, Peirce (CP 6.302) introduced three general aspects of change: tychism, synecism and agapism. Tychistic change is spontaneous, being that of absolute chance, of fortuitous variation. A change happens without articulated, planned and preordained purpose. Synecistic change is about continuity, struggle, agreement and mechanical necessity. In our handling, we could say that this is where we find conflict on one hand and partners on the other. The third mode of change is agapism. It is a commitment to the presence and importance of friendship and love. It is evolution by creative love, evolutionary love, or creative symbiosis, as I like to call it.

Creative symbiosis brings new purposes into being, something that synecistic partnership or tychistic interaction do not. Creative symbiosis is a form of change that is essentially teleological and end-directed (Deacon, 2012; Nagel, 2012). It is not spontaneous although ingredients of surprise, spontaneity and emergence are accounted for there and it is not mechanical even though the evolutionary process seems to proceed from one stage to the other. Creative symbiosis re-does and re-negotiates the purpose, working rules and motivation continuously according to perpetually changing environmental interdependencies and functions. The actual enables the possible and the variation in the possible brings in the potential. Stuart Kauffman (2016) calls this sort of co-creation ’the Adjacent Possible’.

The ontological challenge of co-creation is immense. On a more practical level, the approach of co-creation creates and develops participatory means and encourages people to engage in problem definition, action research design, in the execution of the co-creation process and reflective weighing of results and side-effects. Co-creation is not only about policy solutions but also, perhaps more so, about cultural entrepreneurship and value articulation for more critically responsive, fair, and engaging solutions. Co-creation is about realisations, indeed, about taking coordinated co-creative processes all the way to the ends-in-view, to the fulfilled purpose and emerged side-effects.

Co-creation calls for transdisciplinary research and abductive logic of reasoning. Transdisciplinary science is supposed to help policy processes to produce improved practical effects and novel conceptions and theories about the societal and economic processes behind these improved practical effects. The general purpose of transdisciplinary science is to bring about something that is not yet in existence; this is exactly why the transdisciplinary science must often follow the abductive logic of reasoning. Deduction sustains the theoretical core ideals and the assumption of a particular social practice. In a strict sense, deduction does not produce new knowledge: it only may affirm the hypothesis. Induction goes from particulars to generals deriving knowledge from empirical experience based upon a system of handling data. Inductive inference is not, however, necessary inference, as is deduction.

For Peirce (CP 5.189) abduction is a capacity for “the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis.” However, abduction is not only about adopting the hypothesis but “it is the only logical operation which introduces a novel idea” (Peirce CP 5.171). As Thomas Alexander (2013, 163) reminded us, abduction is “an imaginative effort of understanding.” Abduction is the logic for co-creation. A commitment to co-creation is simply a quest for critical responsiveness in the face of well-intended but surprising policy realisations (Hiedanpää & Bromley 2016, 236). In such a process, the purpose is to co-create and co-select a reasonable practice. We might also say that this is a pragmatist maxim for democratic creativity (e.g., Gouinlock 1999).

As the perpetuity of wolf problems in Finland have indicated, participatory co-design of policy instruments, co-construction of policies, and co-production of knowledge do not necessarily suffice to untangle a complex problematic situation. The problem may have been that the government, its administration and transdisciplinary wildlife research (our work) have not had the will, skills or resources to walk, critically and adaptively, through the implementation and enforcement of new institutional adjustments and policy designs. As so often happens at the critical, almost securely late stage of implementation, transactions are left to take their own spontaneous course, and the results soon turn to side-effects. However, as is evident, co-creation is easier said than done.

References

Alexander, Thomas (2013) The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anon (2015) Management plan for the wolf population in Finland. Helsinki: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

Beck, Ulrich (2016) The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deacon, Terrence (2012) Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Gouinlock, James (1999) Dewey: Creative Intelligence and Emergent Reality. Rosenthal, S.B., Hausman, C.R. and Anderson, T. (Eds.) Classical American Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Hayek von, Friedrich (1982) Law, Legislation and Liberty. London: Routledge. 

Hiedanpää, Juha & Daniel W. Bromley (2016) Environmental Heresies: The Quest for Reasonable. London: Macmillan.

Kauffman, Stuart A. (2016) Humanity in a Creative Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagel, Thomas (2012) Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1934) Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (vols. 1–6) and A. Burks (vols. 7–8). 8 eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sen, Amartya (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.


Originally: ESEE Newsletter Winter 2016 – Hot Topic
Published online:
http://www.euroecolecon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ESEE-Newsletter-WINTER-2016.html