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/

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

The ESEE at 20

The European Society for Ecological Economics turns 20 this year. The society was established in 1996 at the Paris conference held at Saint Quentin en Yvelines. During this time, the operating environment of ESEE has changed quite dramatically but has simultaneously remained almost the same – we are still tackling the same challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change and problems with planning for natural resource use just as during the years of our infancy. Today, ESEE is old enough, but not too old, to adjust its corporeal and mental habits in order to be capable of living with the change in actor networks, in areas of collective attention and climate of ideas.

I have watched the whole history of ESEE, first from a distance and then from within, as a member of the board since 2013. My ESEE history begins from the moments of its inception. During the academic year 1996-1997, I visited Lancaster University (UK) and worked there with John O’Neill and Alan Holland. In our fortnightly sessions, we discussed environmental history and valuation – or, to be honest, I told them what puzzled me and they discussed it intensively for an hour. What brilliant educative moments those were. (As a side-note, I am still puzzled by the same questions.) It was at one of the special Lancaster meetings that I met Clive Spash for the first time. I was happy to hear about the birth of ESEE: ecological economics being done a little differently than it was by the mother society ISEE, the International Society for Ecological Economics. A few years later, Clive became the second president of ESEE, after the inaugural presidency of Sylvie Faucheux.

Because Clive has always had a different and, I should say, a somewhat more radical, angle on key matters in ecological economics, for the purposes of this editorial, I decided to ask him how he sees ecological economics in Europe these days. This was his answer:

“Ecological economics is a conflicted movement that struggles between being co-opted by mainstream economics and finding its own identity as a radical alternative to the mainstream. In Europe, the greater emphasis on social and political theory, classical institutional economics, applied ethics, philosophy of science and history of thought have all helped maintain a better understanding of the potential of the field to achieve social ecological transformation. However, that potential remains unfulfilled. There remains a tendency towards adopting simplistic ‘solutions’, seeking magic bullet approaches that lack theoretical rigour, and adopting supposedly pragmatic positions that appeal to the dominant neoliberal political system. The European Union that offered potential for progressive environmental policy 20 years ago has become a highly problematic institution pushing undemocratic back room deals such as TTIP, neoliberalisation of environmental policy, financialisation of Nature and the drive for innovation, technology, competition and growth above all else. Ecological economists in Europe today need to be aware of this and do better at supporting and seeking institutional reform.”

Its intellectually broader, critical (Continental, perhaps) and more radical mode of doing ecological economics was the first characteristic that attracted me to ESEE. The society had, and still has, a character of its own. As the above quote witnesses, critical preparedness is still evident in Clive’s thinking at a time when ESEE, as an epistemic community, is moving towards the mainstream. I am wondering whether there is a need or a necessity to turn back to the more radical playing fields of ESEE.

After the global financial meltdown in 2008, neoliberal thinking in the global governance of developmental and environmental issues has only strengthened, and the crisis did not lead to the regulatory revisions the critics had hoped to see. Hand in hand with the recovery from the economic and financial crisis come many concurrent trends – climate change, digitalisation processes and the concept of ecosystem services to mention three – that have supported and contributed to the way in which environmental governance and policy are exercised on the global and regional levels. From the ESEE’s perspective, the challenge of providing meaningful institutional advice and workable policy alternatives is ridiculously large. There are two general ways to go, I think: provide up-to-date economic pricing information about the changes in ecosystem services and other natural values which societal planning and decision-making apparatuses seem to lean on, or become a more critical and reformative economic science again that identifies, designs, experiments and evaluates the ideological and societal alternatives. These two are not necessarily incompatible, but to make them compatible takes some intellectual effort. I think this calls for the root mission of ESEE.

But how does Clive see the future of ecological economics in Europe?

“The only future for ecological economics is to become a critical social science that has firm theoretical foundations in understanding biophysical reality. Adopting mainstream models, valuation approaches and market mechanisms merely relegates the field to being a second rate version of the mainstream that it has always criticised and opposed. Yet being an apologist for mainstream ideas has become a common approach. The idea, pervasive in the journal, that the field should be a form of environmental studies or some sustainability science, that includes anything and everything that has the words environment or sustainability in them, is also the antithesis of creating a field of knowledge.

In the last 20 years the complex of social, ecological and economic problems have not been addressed and there has been a reversal of policies and deconstruction of institutions aimed at controlling the worst excesses of corporate capitalism and the consumer society. The drive for growth, markets and money is worse today, individualisation is greater, inequity has grown, the loss of biodiversity has not been stopped, greenhouse gases have increased relentlessly, innovative new pollutants and substances are spreading, militarisation and securitisation have spread and resource extraction has become more dirty and with higher social and environmental impacts (e.g. fracking). To date ecological economics has clearly not succeeded in addressing these issues in any substantive way and will only be helpful if it avoids becoming another rhetorical device for apologising about why planetary destruction and social injustice are necessary so humans can progress. Unfortunately there are a lot of apologists for the capital accumulating system and the growth machine who claim to be ecological economists and there are many who divorce their personal practice from the actions necessary to avoid the continuation of social, ecological and economic crises. If the ESEE is to succeed it must address these issues.”

I agree that the institutional and socioecological problems Clive lists above are something the ESEE folks should get their hands dirty with in the next twenty years. I am not much of a predictor, but I think that taking the task seriously would entail, in general, more ESEE members, perhaps as dedicated economists, becoming engaged not only in the social psychology of emotion, cultural studies on institutional inertia and the organisational ethnography of administrative routines but also in more reform-orientated inter- and transdisciplinary action research on environmental policy planning, implementation and reception for the sake of making things better.

As we can read in this newsletter, Tim Foxon points in this direction in his Hot Topic. He asks how to encourage institutional investors to reorient their investment portfolios towards low carbon energy. It takes effort and courage to go against the current; to take actions that one’s peers will not take, with or without monetary reward. Hopefully more researchers are asking what the source (and sink) of this courageousness is, first of themselves and then of those whom they study. Let me give another example. György Pataki discusses the same general matter in his Hot Topic. However, he does not focus on business enterprises but on the acts of governmental representatives as part of the IPBES process (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). After the policy effort has been taken, biodiversity decline has not halted, and while the meaning and significance of ecosystem services as constituents of socioecological resilience and human wellbeing are becoming clearer due to the IPBES work, governments may grow more hesitant about funding the collective efforts to find and design the conditions of safeguarding the protection of biodiversity and sustainable use of ecosystem services. There is indeed something worth investigating for critical ecological economists in the next 20 years.

ESEE Newsletter Spring 2016 -- Editorial (published online: http://www.euroecolecon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ESEE-Newsletter-SPRING-2016.html )

Being here: Biodiversity and human health, again

Nature is good for humans in a multitude of ways, thanks to biodiversity and its ecosystem services. Of course, nature still causes inner and outer suffering, but in general, and in advanced societies, biodiversity is good from the point of view of subjective and objective human well-being and health. There is growing evidence that nature is no longer a sorry constraint and an unknown that blocks the enlightened purposes of humans.

Ontologically speaking, human arrangements are extending deeper into the “wild”. For instance, a multitude of varieties of REDD+ schemes are being put into practice in different locations on Earth and new ways to identify, map, value and incorporate ecosystem services in resource and land use planning are already routine. Perhaps paradoxically, the days are forgotten when complexity and chaos theories complicated and challenged rational and deliberative planning and decision-making about natural assets, so strong is the optimism about the concept of ecosystem services.

But the “wild" does not stay out there beyond the boundaries of convenience. Under close examination, ecosystem services are not just benefits that flow from the environment to humans. Ecosystems and their services are part of human life, i.e. human life is constituted and sustained by the functional consequences of biodiversity. John Dewey was  already well aware of this. In Human Nature and Conduct, he writes about habits (1988, 14):

"…habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of stomach."

Dewey’s insight was scientifically validated by Hanski et al. (2012), as they found that a decrease in the diversity and quantity of microbial exposure makes our immune system overreact to harmless targets such as our own tissues and allergens. It is now warranted knowledge that ecosystem services happen inside and outside the human body. Disturbances in the delivery of the functional consequences of ecosystems are not only problematic “out there” but “in here” as well. This is important. An increase in environmental pollutants and increased exposure to both those and non-diverse nature have harmful effects on the human immune system.

Diverse nature is good for humans. But it is a tricky question for a modern human as to where this nature is and how to get in contact with it. It is laborious and consumes time and effort to go to nature: people are connected with each other and technologies, but not with nature. We must recall that our backyards are right there in nature, and with their tongues, fur and feet, our pets bring nature inside our houses. As recent studies show, contact with house pets is good for the humans: not only do they contaminate us with positive emotions and motivation to move but also with micro-biota that reduce the risk of childhood asthma (Fall et al. 2015).

During the past few years, understanding of the functional role of biodiversity in ecological assemblages, immune defence systems and pollutant degradation has grown, experiment by experiment and publication by publication. Concrete policy advice is still thin. But the fact is that new findings about the interrelations between environmental variables and human health, particularly risks of autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases, helps planners and policy makers to see new problems but also new opportunities.

These opportunities are not without their implications. And these implications are the field of research for the pragmatically orientated ecological economics for the decades to come. Let me give in some broad brushstrokes a few implications that are ahead of us.

Habits are environmentally constituted. People just do not have habits: people are their habits. As we all know, habit-breaking is not just a matter of getting the correct information about the health impacts of, say, your consumption patterns or monotonous nature. Yes, of course, dramatic pictures may be highly disturbing, but images very seldom change your beliefs or the ways you act - they may change your attitudes, though.

Habit change takes a modification in your action environment. These modifications do not have to be large, but they need be to concrete - and often physical. Otherwise, the existence of new information or persuasion would do the deed. Living environments need to be modified so that the health effects of biodiversity permeate the human skin and membranes and, equally importantly, habits of feeling, acting and thinking: biodiversity needs to become part of us.

This is a challenge, because societies are organised for precisely the opposite purpose: to keep nature out and provide safe and well-planned access points to nature. But, as I have indicated above, new findings about the interdependence of biodiversity and human health will ultimately change how we plan our land use, design our houses and organise our everyday lives. Grasping these problems and designing solutions are still well beyond current scientific and policy understanding. Transdisciplinary - i.e. revolutionary, creative and experimental - advice for, say, city planning, child day-care and food processing is needed.

The list of emerging themes is much longer. But these examples suffice here. Biodiversity and health is the question of our time. There is no longer any reason to cherish what the late German social scientist Ulrich Beck called “the century error” and “organised irresponsibility”. It is not enough to take human purpose out into the wild and design ever more complex schemes for paying for ecosystem services. The wild needs to be brought inside the human domain (Hiedanpää et al. 2011).

Understanding this as an ontological necessity will help us to focus on the practical implications of changing habits of feeling, acting and thinking. Not only will an enormous sum of money be saved because of the increased well-being and prevention of autoimmune and related diseases in particular, but, more generally, being habituated to live with biodiversity and ecosystem services would put an end to organised irresponsibility and the century error: we must cherish what is part of us. This changes everything.

Juha Hiedanpää, ESEE (European Society for Ecological Economics), Newsletter, Hot Topic, Winter 2015 (http://www.euroecolecon.org/newsletter/)

References

Dewey, J. 1988. Human Nature and Conduct. The Middle Works, 1899–1924: Vol 14. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Fall, T., Lundholm, C., Örtqvist, A.K., Fall, K., Fang; F., Hedhammar, Å., Kämpe, O., Ingelsson, E. & Almqvist; C. 2015. Early exposure to dogs and farm animals and the risk of childhood asthma. JAMA Pediatr 169(11):e153219. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.3219.

Hanski I., von Hertzen L., Fyhrquistc N. et al. 2012. Environmental biodiversity, human microbiota, and allergy are interrelated. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109: 8334–9.

Hiedanpää, J., Kotilainen, J. & Salo, M. 2011. Unfolding the organised irresponsibility: Ecosystem approach and the quest for forest biodiversity in Finland, Peru, and Russia. Forest Policy Econ 13: 159–165.

Under the skin: Ecosystem services, habits and human health

The Finnish Cultural Foundation has an Argumenta funding mechanism. The purpose of it is to stimulate dialogue between scientific communities on those matters that might have high scientific and societal potential but whose scientific and societal significance has not yet been thoroughly understood.

“Ecosystem services and human health” is one of the most recent Argumenta projects. The project aims to (i) identify the linkages between ecosystem services and human health, (ii) create new multidisciplinary approaches to study ecosystem services and human health and well-being, and (iii) to help implement scientific results and insights into the practices of urban planning and decision making in natural resource management.

Some twenty years ago ecosystem heath was a proposed metaphor for environmental management and biodiversity policy. A healthy ecosystem is resistant, resilient and adaptable. The idea was then, and still is now, that biodiversity and its healthy functioning support human wellbeing and health. Perhaps because of its anthropogenic flavor, the metaphor was swiftly replaced by that of ecosystem resilience.

But the important message was, and still is, that the functional consequences of biodiversity matter. These functional consequences have been conceptualized in many ways. They have been called supporting and regulating ecosystem services and primary ecological values.

Function is the causal antecedent to the end (Deacon 2012, 38-39). Therefore, equally importantly, the functional consequences of biodiversity extend to people and their wellbeing and health. Human communities and societies built their livelihoods and wellbeing on ecosystem functioning. The ends are co-constitutive. This is exactly why the conception social-ecological is used in ecological economics.

The human significance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning extends beyond cultural and provisioning ecosystem services. Of course recreational opportunities, beautiful landscapes, medical plants and the edible goods from ecosystems are important in creating and sustaining human wellbeing.

But biodiversity has functional consequences that contribute even more thoroughly to the human social-ecological capacity for resistance, resilience and adaptability in the face of environmental changes. The argument of the Argumenta Project Ecosystem services and human health is to communicate to a wider scientific community, policy-makers and the public the idea of human health as an ecosystem service.

A co-leader of the Argumenta project, Professor Liisa Tyrväinen, suggests that even short-term - 20 minute - visits to nature areas have positive effects on perceived stress relief compared to the built-up environment. Tyrväinen et al (2014, 8) conclude their study:

“… the managed urban parks with old trees and natural views and the urban woodland were perceived as more coherent and were better environments for restoration and for having feelings of vitality and creativity. The results of our experiment suggest that the large urban parks (more than 5 ha) and large urban woodlands have positive well-being effects on urban inhabitants, and in particular for healthy middle-aged women. The results suggest that spending time in urban green areas after work has stress-reducing effects. This means that urban parks and woodlands should be easily accessible for residents.”

It is important that citizens have an access to nature. The urban planning of cities and the planning of everyday life on the individual level should, according to the most recent findings (see references in Tyrväinen et al 2014) provide a diverse set of entry points into nature.

But besides this “possibility to visit nature” -aspect there is another and even more crucial aspect to the health effects of biodiversity. According to recent research conducted on both the Finnish and Russian side of Karelia, people should not only have entry points to visit nature, but should in a habitual manner transact with biodiversity as part of their everyday life.

Professor Ilkka Hanski and his colleagues (2012) found out that in the Karelia area, northeastern Finland, biodiversity, human skin microbiome, and atopic allergy are interrelated. One of the authors, Professor Tari Haahtela, (2014, 21) explains the meaning of the results:

“More and more people around the world are living in cities and experiencing little contact with nature. Environmental microorganisms, especially commensals, previously ubiquitous and abundantly present, for example, in drinking water and milk, are key players for the induction and maintenance of immunoregulatory circuits and tolerance. Adaptation to modern urban life is a challenge to immune development and mismatched immunologic mechanisms lead to symptoms and disease. Contact with natural environments rich in species seems to be strongly related to immunotolerance via the presence of beneficial protective microbes of the skin, gut, and airways. These microbes create a living interface between human body and the environment and extend deeper in the tissue than known before.”

He (2014, 22) continues:

“Humans have evolved with microorganisms, which may not only comprise bacteria and fungi, but also viruses and microscopic protozoans, although hardly any data on the latter are available. Human commensals are no longer considered as passive bystanders or transient passengers, but increasingly as active and essential participants in the development and maintenance of barrier function and immunologic tolerance.”

“Inflammation is a cardinal feature of asthma and allergic diseases, autoimmune diseases, and many forms of cancer, but more recently, less tangible associations have been linked to these trends such as an increased incidence of obesity and depression with inflammatory markers... Also autism and Alzheimer disease have been associated with microbial deprivation.”

And (2014, 23) concludes:

“Population growth (urbanization) leads to loss of biodiversity (poor macrobiota/microbiota), poor human microbiota (dysbiosis), immune dysfunction (poor tolerance), inappropriate inflammatory responses, and finally symptoms and clinical disease… The interplay of environmental genome (macrobiome), human microbial genome (microbiome), and human genome determines health and diseases. It is time to revisit the allergy paradigm and consider new kind of actions to combat the burden.”

Seen from this perspective, ecosystem services are not benefits that flow from the environment to humans. Ecosystems and their services are part of human life, i.e. human life is constituted and sustained by the functional consequences of biodiversity. Ecosystem services happen inside and outside the human body. According to the findings of Hanski and Haahtela, ecosystem services happen in the human microbial genome, in the microbiome, on the skin and in mucous membranes.

Healthy human life is constituted by transactions with biodiversity and nature. This is a true extension to the meaning of the concept of ecosystem services.

The question is how to modify habits and living environments in such a way that human contact with nature becomes constant and diverse. Indeed, this is a matter of individual reflection and self-creation but equally importantly it is a matter of land use planning and environmental policy. The question is then how to bring agricultural action-oriented countryside into the everyday life of urban city dwellers, and how to nudge the habits of feeling and mind of urban city dwellers to consider that kind of living is worthwhile to test and experiment with.

To produce multidisciplinary knowledge, support transdisciplinary experiments and provide real-life political advice on ecosystem services and human health is one of the key tasks of ecological economics in the decades to come.


Juha Hiedanpää, ESEE (European Society for Ecological Economics), Newsletter, Hot Topic, Summer 2014.


References

Deacon. T. 2012. Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

Haahtela T. What is needed for allergic children? Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2014: 25: 21–24.

Hanski I., von Hertzen L., Fyhrquistc N. et al. (2012) Environmental biodiversity, human microbiota, and allergy are interrelated. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2012: 109: 8334–9.

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Biodiversity, motivation, habit: The big bad wolf and biodiversity in general

Biodiversity is on the decline globally. This is the case despite various institutional designs following the RIO 1992 summit. On a Brundtlandian pathway, the Rio+20 meeting rearticulated the concern and hoped that we [the representatives of the States] “with the full participation of civil society, renew our commitment to sustainable development and to ensuring the promotion of an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future.” In twenty years, the focus has shifted to the critical role of civil society in attaining sustainable development. It is not only formal institution-building that matters.

The principles and spirits of international treaties, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the Bern Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and, in Europe, the Habitats Directive as well, set the basis for national conservation legislation. In Finland, as well as in other parts of Europe, national biodiversity strategies and biodiversity action plans have recently been undergoing renewal. Governments around the globe are taking various steps to handle the challenge of biodiversity. How much do biodiversity or ecosystem services really weigh?

The work of the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) began in 2012 with high expectations. It is hoped that IPBES will prove as meaningful on the biodiversity front as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become on the climate front. This may of course become the case. As national work is about to begin, one important aspect has come to the fore, at least in Finland. Governmental resources for the IPBES are miniscule. At the first IPBES stakeholder meeting, held in November 2013, it became evident that the majority of the work will build upon voluntary action by scientists and administrators. Some participants stated that the lack of financial resources will handicap the process. But not all shared that opinion.

One environmental economist stood up and claimed that, the situation being as it is, we - as scientists and administrators - must act voluntarily, become committed to the task of the good cause without asking for payment for our time and effort. She hit the nail on the head.

Recall all of the fine institutional arrangements erected for the sake of protecting biodiversity – and the problems still prevail. The true challenge is, then, not the institutional scaffolding as such but the motivation that these scaffolds prevent or enable. It seems to be the case that biodiversity laws, policies and instruments do not motivate people to act for nature. Indeed, institutions have been erected to prevent us from doing wrong (to biodiversity and people) but they have not been designed to help us to do good. Prohibitions do not motivate action the same way as, say, encouragement.

Nonetheless, people do exist who act for biodiversity. How do they do it? Why do they do it?

This is exactly what the BIOMOT project (MOTivational strength of ecosystem services and alternative ways to express the value of BIOdiversity) is addressing in 2011–2015. The BIOMOT project, funded by the EU’s FP7 programme, collects together partners from seven European countries, comprising eight partner universities. The project is employing a variety of scientific disciplines, such as economics, philosophy, governance studies and social psychology. The interdisciplinary work will explore (i) the current state of environmental valuation and actual and potential alternatives to mainstream approaches; (ii) the features of those biodiversity policies, instruments and initiatives that motivate people to act; (iii) the personal and social characteristics of the innovators of such schemes; and (iv) the building blocks of the alternative theory of motivation. When the project concludes, it might be possible to gain a robust insight how these “successful” schemes have broken old habits and routines and helped to form new ones that motivate people to act for nature.

It is, indeed, one task to figure out the causes and reasons for inactivity, i.e. why people do not act for nature. The other task is to figure out why people act purposefully against nature. This is the wicked case with the protection of some specimens of biodiversity, say, the wolf (Canis lupus).

In Finland, the government has been committed to erecting institutional scaffolds to protect the wolf, but this has actually had the opposite effect: despite the efforts, the size of the wolf population has been in a steady decline for nearly all of the past ten years. The Finnish wolf policy is a showcase in institutional design, the purpose of which is to prevent people from doing wrong, i.e. killing wolves illegally. The government has, for instance, introduced a category of severe hunting crime to the criminal code and multiplied the nominal values of large carnivores. The approach has not been a solution to a problem. Perhaps it is one of its key causes. The top-down regulation of the wolf issues faces strong and persistent resistance, and at the same time the ex ante and ex post damage compensation schemes and ever more accurate information about the numbers and origins of wolves are not really helping the people to live with the wolves.

The question is: which kinds of instruments or policies would motivate people to live with the wolves? This is not a matter of preventing people from doing wrong, but actively helping them to do something which is good for both themselves and the broader society. This concern does not only apply in Finland. Large carnivores are also returning to their native territories and habitats after decades of absence in other parts of Europe.

Perhaps the wolf policy would need workable “nudges” to make co-existence easier. According to Cass Sunstein (2013, Simpler: the future of government, p. 38), “nudges are approaches that influence decisions while preserving the freedom of choice”. Thinking around nudges offers a way to look beyond regulation, compensation and information and focus on how to design perhaps only slightly modified choice architectures that may have large effects on outcomes, i.e. how people come to terms with the presence of the wolf. The wolf-related nudges alter the shared environment of the wolf and humans. For instance, feeding areas for white-tailed deer may be located a bit further away from the vicinity of houses (so that they do not draw wolves close to humans) or sheep pastures that are located close to wolves’ ecological routes may be relocated (in order to lower the risk). These kinds of social-ecological nudges preserve freedom of choice but may subtly break the old habits of feeling, mind and action and help to form new ones.

In order to halt biodiversity decline, the challenge lies in understanding the anatomy of motivation, how motivation is related to habits, and how nudges and policy instruments can help to change problematic behavioural patterns without diminishing the degree of freedom and curtailing the basic rights of citizens, consumers and other species.

Juha Hiedanpää, ESEE (European Society for Ecological Economics), Newsletter, Winter 2013.

Success in Finnish wolf policy

When thinking about Finnish wolf policy, success is not the first thing that comes to mind. This is because the number of wolves barely exceeds 125 individuals, the modern peak being some 250 wolves (25 breeding pairs) in the spring of 2006. In 1996, one year after Finland joined the EU, the number was higher than it is today. In terms of population trends, the wolf policy has not been a success story. If, however, one looks at governmental wolf-related actions in more detail, many events, processes and decisions have been pushing human-wolf co-existence towards more sustainable pathways. In what follows, we explicate some features of this success through the policy cycle.

Problem identification

Policy design begins with a problem, a need to adjust the institutional setup or administrative procedures. One of the successful features in Finnish wolf policy has been the on-going, pertinent dialogue between the Finnish government and the European Commission about wolves in Finland. Because an initial informal dialogue did not produce the desired outcomes, the Commission initiated an Infringement Procedure on Finnish wolf policy in 2001. During the process, alleged policy problems were examined and reasoned. As a consequence, Finland was called to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in 2005 and, two years later, was found guilty of the unselective hunting of wolves. In response to the ECJ judgment, Finland started a process of renewing the administrative procedures and mechanisms for enforcing the strict protection of the wolf. The problem-orientated informal dialogue is still on-going between Finland and the Commission, the focus being placed on the illegal hunting of wolves. As dialogue is a two-way process, the Commission has become better informed about the social and cultural conditions and consequences of the wolf’s presence on densely populated human areas.

Policy design

In the face of declining wolf populations and the pressure imposed by the Commission, the wolf protection rules in Finland have become tighter and tougher. There have been four major institutional adjustments over a rather short period of time. First, the nominal values of some endangered large carnivores were multiplied by more than five times (2010). Second, the severe hunting crime category was introduced into the Finnish Criminal Code (2011).Third, a new Wildlife and Game Administration Act (2011) was enacted, which recentralised decision-making on derogation from the strict protection of the wolf. Forth, the so-called ‘yard wolf decree’ was introduced in 2013. With the decree, the government re-articulated and hence created a new category according to which derogation from the strict protection of the wolf can happen: a yard wolf is a wolf that repeatedly visits human settlements – i.e. the wolf does not necessarily cause damage or an acute threat to human safety, but the repetitive and continuous presence of the species creates a risk and may potentially be of danger to human safety. These four adjustments show that the Finnish government and wildlife administration are capable of acting and have the capacity to adjust the rules of the game when facing sufficient pressure either from the European Union or from civil society.

Policy implementation

The wolf is a game animal in Finnish legislation. Paradoxically, it is a strictly protected game animal. Wolf policy is a conservation policy lead by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the ministry whose main purpose is to erect institutional and policy scaffoldings for the utilisation of natural resources and game species. It comes as no surprise that the implementation of wolf policy has involved policing for derogation from the strict protection. The processes of applying and deciding on the licences to derogate have become the key procedure of wolf protection. In the spirit of good governance required in the Administrative Law, along a sequence of applications, the regional wildlife agencies have helped candidates to improve the quality of their applications. Consequently, the process of asking for and giving reasons to derogate has developed considerably. In addition, the environmental NGOs have a say in the process, since they are entitled to submit their set of reasons for or against the applied licence. In this respect, the administrative rules, procedures and practices have become more evidence-based, participatory and transparent. The fact that the derogation policy is now exercised strictly according to the rules and spirit of the Habitats Directive and Finnish Hunting Act may indeed be considered as a policy success.

Policy evaluation

One of the criteria for a successful policy is policy makers’ sensitivity to feedback. In Finland, after almost twenty years of formal EU-driven wolf policing, the government and wildlife administration have acknowledged the existence of critical civil society voices and the fact that it is worth the effort to take their concerns, desires and hopes into consideration. The mechanism for hearing these voices has hitherto been missing, however. Now, the updating process of the management plan for the wolf, which will begin in autumn 2013, will provide such an arena. The wildlife administration has already started to frame the process as ‘wolf territory politics’. What this means in detail is still an open question. But as tentatively articulated, the purpose of territory politics is to anchor the managerial activities on territory level and collaboratively design voluntary economic incentives to live with the wolves. This may well become a policy success. The government and the wildlife administration are now taking the first steps towards dialogue with civil society and its citizens and interest groups.

Conclusion

Even though the jurisdiction and the government have their important roles in policy design, implementation and enforcement, the practical dimension, i.e. the managerial task of identifying the real-life constraints, enabling structures and incentives for coping with the presence of the wolf, belongs to the Finnish Wildlife Agency and Regional Wildlife Councils. This is because according to the Wildlife and Game Administration Act, the latter leads and coordinates regional wildlife policy and the former administrates the regional managerial wildlife activities. Perhaps, indeed, the recognition of the multitude of motivated voices from civil society, the necessity to exercise collaborative ‘territory politics’ and the administrative obligation to make wolf policy reasonable will become the key features of future wolf policy. The future will show where the more nuanced elements of success and obstacles will emerge.

The New Rural World: from Crises to Opportunities

The XIII World Congress of Rural Sociology: “The New Rural World: from Crises to Opportunities” was held in Lisbon (Portugal) between 29 July and 4 August 2012. The general theme of the congress was the crisis threatening rural livelihoods and the agri-food system, and emerging paradigms for change. About a thousand students, scholars and researchers contributed to the conference and its working groups.

One highlight was the plenary lecture given by Prof. Sousa Santos from Coimbra University. He discussed knowledge production and “knowledges of struggles” produced as people contest each other’s knowledge and concept of time, which is commonly and popularly taught to lead towards modernisation and globalisation. In addition, the western conception of time implies that the arrow of time proceeds linearly forward and that the core countries of the world system are at the head of progress. According to Prof. Sousa Santos, the western scholarly approaches rest on western worldviews. He stressed that academia would benefit from the use of the indigenous and non-western instruments and alternative approaches to science. Researchers should engage in new kinds of transdisciplinary project.

De Sousa Santos also emphasised “ecology of knowledges” based on indigenous and personal knowledge. Here, for Santos, ecology means an arena where different practices are exercised and hopefully sustainable interactions take place among different entities (people/animal/societies, etc.). The “ecology of knowledges” would allow the pragmatic discussion of alternative criteria of validity and alternative scholarly avenues to policy advice. A good example of this is the difficulty with developing alternative solutions in the European crisis that is currently emerging in many countries. According to Santos, Europe is becoming underdeveloped, partly because of colonial antagonism. Antagonism is still strong in Europe, and hinders the Europeans from perceiving workable solutions to their problems.

De Sousa Santos also encouraged us to apply “a global form of learning” and incorporate the social movements that are emerging in the Fourth World into policy making. For Santos, many indigenous communities and Thmovements are considered non-existent by western scientists. He called this invisibility the “sociology of absences”. If sociology usually gives different critical perspectives to the structures, agencies and functionings of the world, for Santos, sociology represents issues to be constructed against hegemonic social science and upon epistemological presuppositions. It is through this process, when entities of “sociology of absences” start working, that monocultures will be replaced by alternative ecologies.

Indeed, new developments in visibility are taking shape, for instance in Latin America. For the first time, the new constitution in Bolivia has been translated into the country’s indigenous languages. Indigenous people now have an opportunity to become more involved in local politics and influence how relevant knowledge is produced and signified.

Therefore, one might wonder about the applicability of the concept of the “sociology of absences” in Finnish wolf policy. It seems that some of the local views are going unrecognised in the current wolf discourse. The state regulations designed by the dominant state institutions might have hidden the viewpoints of local people and local “ecology of knowledges” within management practices. Hence, it is actually more demanding because the public is expecting to find alternative managerial solutions for the grey wolf issues in south-western Finland.

 

 

A pathway towards a green economy: resistance, adaptation and democracy

The International Society for Ecological Economics organised the ISEE 2012 Conference on “Ecological Economics and Rio+20: Challenges and Contributions for a Green Economy” in Rio de Janeiro on 16–19 June 2012. The conference preceded the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20. In both events, the focus was on how to green the global economy and protect biodiversity.

On a Brundtlandian pathway, the UNCSD felt it had succeeded “with the full participation of civil society, renew our commitment to sustainable development and to ensuring the promotion of an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations.” Not everyone shares this optimism. These massive conferences hardly touched on the most important issues: In what ways do the concept and policy purpose of green economy help achieve sustainable futures, what are the more detailed institutional and social steps towards the greening of the economy. Joan Martinez-Alier, one of the former presidents of ISEE, expressed his deep concern over the greening of the logic of economic and financial systems: the real real-life economics is again a few steps further away.

Interestingly, in one of the ISEE panels (which all were surprisingly good), two activists and environmentalists, Sunita Narain and Nnimmo Bassey, offered important thoughts about how to make the greening of economy on-going. The first of the three prerequisites they identified is resistance. Civic society must be courageous enough to actively resist policies and economic agendas that will produce adverse impacts on fairness and sustainability of development. The second prerequisite is adaptation. Civic society must actively start exploring ways to overcome the conditions and vicious consequences of bad governance. Both Narain and Bassey expressed moderate optimism that the globalisation of civic society can allow the new rights to emerge and exert effective pressure on how and for what purposes (rights) national and transnational institutions are designed. The third prerequisite is democracy. As Narain repeatedly emphasised, democracy has primacy. Without democracy, no transitions to sustainability and green economy will ever take place.

These lessons also apply in Finland. The same general advice for greening the economy, protecting biodiversity and sustaining livelihoods applies: more resistance, more adaptations, and more democracy. Civic society in Finland is not known for its habit of resisting governmental and administrative intentions. When it comes to biodiversity protection, however, the situation is different. For instance, the planning and implementation of the Natura 2000 reserve network some 15 years ago and, more recently, the strict protection of the grey wolf, have sparked considerable resistance. The culture of environmental resistance is still rather weak and young in Finland and its purpose has in many cases been against biodiversity rather than for it. Perhaps for this reason, the civic society adaptations and innovations for biodiversity and the green economy have been rather rare. As Bassey reminded us, it takes resistance to become creative. The UNCSD process claimed that it is fuelled by “the full participation of civic society”. Let us hope that this is a promise. The task is to make our thoughts and practices clear concerning how to convert this democratic promise into the substance of green economy, biodiversity protection and sustainable livelihoods. It takes resistance and adaptive creativity to call democracy to the fore.

The importance of what is absent

Juha took part in the tenth annual seminar of the Arctic Doctoral Programme ARKTIS in Rovaniemi, Finland, on March 16. This year’s theme was “Science‐Policy Interface – Societal Impacts of Arctic Research”. Below is the abstract of his presentation.

Ecosystem services are everywhere. But there is something in their constitution that is absent. According to philosopher John Searle (Making the Social World, Oxford, 2010), true beliefs fit the world. In the strict sense of the word, desires, intentions, and prescriptions cannot be true. They are not intended to represent the world as it is now, but how we would like the world to be. Intentions and desires have a world-to-mind direction of fit. They require the world to change to match them. True beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit.

Disturbingly, then, what we consider worth having, doing or being is absent – it is still becoming. This characteristic of absence applies also to natural functions. According to anthropologist neuroscientist Terrence Deacon (Incomplete Nature, New York, 2012, 38–39), “we describe function a process that exists in order to produce an otherwise unlikely state of affairs.” Function may be a product of design, but since Darwin it has been possible to understand function as emerging spontaneously, having end-directed character emerging irrespective of any anticipated end.

The important epistemic question is how to fit our institutions with individual and collective purposes and natural functions. This is exactly why ecosystem services are important and environmental policy so hard. Over the past few years, environmental policy makers have begun to show a special interest in ecosystem functions and, especially, in ecosystem services: namely some of the unlikely states of affairs produce items and features that are directly and indirectly beneficial to people.

The future research on socioecological systems must bring these absentee features to the fore. The core methodological challenge is then to make sense how healthy socioecological functioning is maintained, i.e. how direct, indirect, enacted and undergone ecosystem services could fit with human purposes and how to make human purposes fit with ecosystem functions. The concept of ecosystem service is not a magic bullet. But it could help planners, decision-makers and citizens to have an anticipative focus on what is constitutive but still absent. This would help us all to understand why the customary environmental policy easily misfit the environmental problems and why policy does not match the existing institutional arrangements.