Introduction

This chapter presents those extensions of Nordic geography that have engaged with the variation of human values, intentions and practices linked to nature and the environment. This orientation developed alongside the advancing environmental consciousness and attached administrative changes in the Nordic countries and soon began to systematically analysing the political disputes linked to nature-use. Consequently, these analyses resulted in stimulating conceptualisations of social natures and plural natures (see Häkli, 1996; Olwig, 1984; Seppänen, 1986). Later, on this ground, the studies have much focused on the trends of politicisation and depoliticization of nature and its use.Footnote 1 The particular Nordic moment has most clearly emerged in studies dealing with socio-environmental tensions and their resolutions in resource conflicts related to forestry and mining, as well as in oil-based development. Accordingly, nature has not been defined, and thus identified as a question on its own in these studies but located under the multitude of practical socio-spatial processes and projections. This has let the empirical variation of plural natures be fully presented.

In general, the socio-spatial rethinking in this subfield of Nordic geography has focused on (1) the variations of nature’s roles and meanings, hence it’s placing, in societal change, (2) the affordances and risks, such as tipping points, emerging from within socially modified natures and (3) the necessities of societal transition due to socio-environmental emergencies. This historical grounding is shortly presented in the subchapter below.

Politics of Nature

In Nordic geography the initial research formulations on the politics of nature were greatly inspired by the critical geographical tradition – kritisk samhällsgeografi – which forged approaches that covered both the material dynamics of society-nature and the multiple representations of social and ecological natures in the 1980s (Lehtinen, 1991; Olwig, 1984, 1986; Seppänen, 1986). This move significantly broadened the earlier strictly materialist, and Marxist interpretations of nature in Nordic critical geography (Brandt et al., 1976; Nielsen, 1976; Olwig, 1976; Vartiainen, 1979, 1984) and it also aimed at diversifying both the European continental conceptualisations of nature in critical geography (Ossenbrügge, 1983, 1993; Wittfogel, 1973, 1976, 1985) and respective trans-Atlantic advances in nature research (Blaikie, 1985; Burgess, 1978; Lowe & Warboys, 1978; Peet, 1985; Smith, 1984; Walker, 1978).

In the 1990s Jouni Häkli further developed the Nordic geography tradition by exploring nature’s social and spatial place in urbanisation (Häkli, 1996, see also Häkli & Uotila, 1993). Focused on Berlin in the immediate years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he regarded urban nature as a material realm and a reality conceived of and conceptualized by humans. Nature’s meanings are, according to him, negotiated within “a multitude of social situations and practices with particular histories and geographies” (Häkli, 1996, p. 137). In other words, nature should be thought of as plural natures. Consequently, he argued, “as we do not have a single essence of nature […] we are engaged in a politics of nature in the city, a collision of meanings and values attached to different places and uses of environment” (Ibid., p. 138).

This type of approach to the politics of nature was thereafter developed by Jarno Valkonen (2003, 2007) who studied, in a Sámi context, how diverging claims of nature and their collisions influence the practices of culture-nature. Consequently, he analysed how various practices of claiming and placing nature affect the politics of nature-use. According to him, emphasising placing practices allow for the material grounding of politics. For Valkonen (2007, pp. 30–35), the politicisation of nature takes place where various coalitions (of nature-use) arise due to confronting definitions and valuations of nature, their history and placing. Similarly, Eveliina Asikainen (2014), while studying suburban politics of nature in Tampere, turned towards the continuous contestation and politicisation of the forms of nature-use (Asikainen, 2014, pp. 22–24). She traced the enactment of nature, that is, the emergence of novel ecosystems and “future natures”, due to political-administrative negotiations and agreements, various lay practices and related changes in local-ecological processes (see also Asikainen & Jokinen, 2009).

The placing of nature was also the question for Holgersen and Malm (2015) in their study of the politics of greening in Malmö as a solution to its industrial fallout of the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1990s the city launched efforts to regain economic growth through the promotion of environmental issues in comprehensive planning. Inspired by David Harvey’s (2001) notion of spatial fix, Holgersen and Malm called this linking of economy and ecology a green fix. By this they referred to the concerted politics of greening to stop companies’ withdrawals, i.e., spatial fixes, and attract new investments – which in the case of Malmö were successful to such a degree that the city was later “reckoned to be among the world’s greenest cities” (Ibid, p. 275). However, the authors criticise Malmö municipality’s tactics of locating greening under growth priorities and, moreover, utilising it as a mask to hide from heated ecological questions, such as carbon control, the social realities of segregation, unemployment and unrest.

The incorporation of the material realm and grounding is present, with slightly differing nuances, in the politics of nature studies referred to above. This linkage was richly expressed by Haila and Lähde (2003) in the introduction to an anthology entitled Luonnon politiikka (Politics of nature, or, Nature’s politics). They underline that natural processes and non-human actors in fact do take part in politics by affording “material”, and hence fuel the debate on the feasibility of human co-being within the conditions set by nature (Haila & Lähde, 2003, pp. 9–10). In addition, they argued, this feasibility can only be specified in comparisons between constraints and prospects afforded by nature. Risks thus need to be assessed against the strains they put on nature’s vitality and socio-environmental vulnerability to ecological catastrophes (see also Haila & Dyke, 2006).

Niko Humalisto (2014) advanced neo-materialist geographical applications in his study of biofuel governance in the European Union (EU). He concludes that the unintended changes in the assemblages of biofuel production and consumption demonstrate serious weaknesses in the type of spatial modelling approach that the EU has favoured. The first decades of the EU’s ambitious biofuel programme became a textbook example of the mismatch between aims and outcomes. The programme, launched in the early 1990s, soon resulted in increasing carbon emissions and environmental degradation and, due to “dedicating food to fuel”, severe backlashes from food safety advocates (Humalisto & Joronen, 2013, p. 182). Globally, the most challenging backlash was witnessed in South-East Asia in the form of the rapid expansion of tropical palm oil plantations. Palm oil hence afforded, and in a way fuelled, the extraction of rainforests, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia. Moreover, palm oil consequently also extended its transnational presence in consumers’ daily lives, not only in the form of biofuel, which is to be cancelled by 2030 in the EU, but also as a critical component in a multitude of food items to be consumed in our kitchens throughout the world.

Rather similarly, Haarstad and Wanvik (2017) suggest in their study of fossil fuel dependencies that the assemblage approach might be useful when facing the instability of contemporary “carbonscapes”. They argue that carbonscapes, the social and material landscapes of fossil fuels, are today under increasing attack and this might result in rapidly rising systemic volatility. Less car-centric urbanism, for example, questions the established systems of automobility and, to keep up with this transformation, a conceptual framework is needed that is open to unpredictable volatility and systemic ruptures (see also Haarstad, 2016; Haarstad & Oseland, 2017; Haarstad & Wanvik, 2020).

Furthermore, an inspiring rethinking of this type of (planetary) neo-materialism was advanced by Juha Kotilainen (2021), who throughout the 2010s had concentrated on mining issues. This research made him realise how thoroughly minerals and their extraction are linked to world history and politics. In addition, due to his attentiveness to general trends in local-global resource extraction, he devoted a major part of his book to the reconceptualisation of the planetary dynamics by reflecting upon, for example, moving frontiers for extraction, multiscale resilience and shifting spatial divisions and scales linked to expansive extraction (see also Quimbayo Ruiz, 2021).

To summarise, Nordic research of the politics of nature has thus identified three complementary angles to nature’s politicisation: First, studies of nature have evolved into studies of plural natures and, consequently, often included analyses of the collision of meanings and values of nature. Nature’s contested placing and the attached socio-spatial change has been here the primary research question. Second, politics of nature researchers have examined the constraints and affordances of material nature and they have also analysed the active (political) role of nature in shaping human/non-human conditions. Here the focus has moved from everyday oil addictions to movements of geopolitical minerals and lately also toward he causes and consequences of Covid19 (Pyy & Lehtinen, 2021; Rannila & Jaatsi, 2021). The emphasis of nature’s active presence, and performance, has in this way inspired the conceptualisation of posthuman socio-spatialities (Hankonen, 2022; Lehtinen, 2022). This extension has, however, given rise to an intense debate regarding the dire consequences of universalising social nature (Malm, 2015, 2019), the actual prospects of nature’s agency (Hornborg, 2017) and the risks of eroding human sense of responsibility due to distributed agency (Häkli, 2018). Third, the re-articulation of critical co-dependencies, intensifying multiscale extraction and shifting socio-spatial turbulences, have introduced the drama of deepening planetary emergency as a decisive moment for the global regimes of economics and politics. Systemic volatility is on the agenda, as is the necessity of systemic change.

Post-politics of Nature

Signs and tendencies of depoliticisation have, as elsewhere, increasingly been scrutinised and analysed by Nordic geographers during the last decade. Case studies have contributed to the specification of the post-political turn, or era, and moreover, advanced the theory of a post-politics (Ahlqvist & Sirviö, 2020; Anshelm et al., 2018; Anshelm & Haikola, 2018; Haikola & Anshelm, 2018; Kellokumpu & Sirviö, 2022; Luukkonen & Sirviö, 2017, 2019; Takala et al., 2020, 2021). This orientation is in many ways emerging from within the Nordic context as part of the disciplinary development summarised above, but it has also been broadly informed by both continental European inspirations (e.g., Arendt, 2002; Bourdieu, 2002; Latour, 2004; Mouffe, 1993/2020, 2005; Ranciére, 2009; Zizek, 2009) and the latest progress in related trans-Atlantic research (especially Swyngedow, 2011; Swyngedow & Wilson, 2014).

In general, the Nordic analysis and critique of the depoliticization of nature owes much to the profound European continental rethinking among those political philosophers who have conceptualised the risky features of depoliticisation, especially from the viewpoint of democracy. The concern is that the technocratic and consensual practices that evolve and expand beyond the transparent political sphere tend to reduce radically the differentiation, disagreements and contradictions that are constitutive of healthy democracies (see Takala et al., 2020, 2021).

Chantal Mouffe (2005), who is perhaps the most influential philosopher of depoliticisation, presents a critical analysis of a consensual post-political vision that relies on such fashionable notions as partisan-free democracy, dialogic democracy, cosmopolitan democracy, good governance, global civil society, cosmopolitan sovereignty and absolute democracy. For her, the advocates of post-politics long for “a world beyond left and right, beyond hegemony, beyond sovereignty and beyond antagonism” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 2). She continues, while focusing on politics as hegemony, that finally: “every order is political and based on some form of exclusion. There are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 18).

Inspired by Mouffe, Jonas Anshelm et al. (2018) define depoliticisation as a specific form of neoliberal governance that obscures the contestable nature of governing that promotes consensus to the detriment of democratic disagreement. Based on their mining studies in Sweden, they argue that an issue may be unpoliticised without being depoliticised and, hence, speaking of a general state of postpolitics is, according to them, highly problematic. For them, depoliticisation functions as a displacement of politics that should be understood as a way of governing rather than an active process of making something that is political un-political.

Rather similarly, Luukkonen and Sirviö (2017, 2019) conclude, while analysing the candidates’ statements in the Helsinki mayoral election in 2017, that the rhetoric of depoliticisation does not “constitute a post-political condition”. Instead, they argue, “it is best viewed as a powerful form of political action drawing supposedly neutral criterion of economic performance and directed against the contingency of democratic politics” (Luukkonen & Sirviö, 2017, p. 114). Takala et al. (2020), in a study of depoliticisation of Finnish forestry planning in media discourses, conclude that the powerful discourses targeting a hegemonic position are determined to make their own truth normal and natural – and this is done by silencing or hiding contradictions, divisions and disagreements that would otherwise question their truth claims. Indeed, silencing and hiding thus function as a displacement of politics.

Furthermore, Anshelm and Haikola (2018, p. 585) argue for detailed empirical studies which would help refine the theorisation of postpolitics. Derived from their case studies, they criticise those approaches that tend to construct bipolar, and antagonistic, settings where the (assumed) depoliticisation of official policy-making is challenged by the repoliticising efforts from the side of opposition (Anshelm et al., 2018, pp. 212–213). This critical stance, developed against some of the key contributions by scholars within continental and trans-Atlantic circles, is a clear sign of particular Swedish, if not Nordic, emphasis in this field of geography. As I will discuss in the next section, the argument takes shape within a particular societal and disciplinary context.

Back to Politics

Anshelm and Haikola (2018, p. 564) argue that politicisation takes place both via protests and formal channels of governance. Conflict is not the only dimension of politics, even though it is certainly an important one. In practice, Anshelm and Haikola summarise that the repoliticisation of local environmental issues often takes place through scaling-up and moving upwards beyond the strictly local puzzles (Ibid., p. 582).

On this background, Anshelm et al. (2018) criticise currently popular de/repoliticisation studies which tend to see depoliticisation in the realm of official policy-making, whereas acts of repoliticisation tend to be seen as part of civic dissent. This critique might arise from the experiences of a specific Swedish management culture that is, according to Peterson (2004), relatively open and quite adjusted to multicultural co-management. Peterson, after having compared Finnish and Swedish forest industry concepts, underlines the Swedish favouring of “careful circulation of items for comments before decision-making” (see Peterson, 2004, p. 229). Peterson maintains that Swedish executives reach decisions through dialogue, delegate responsibilities, and search for consensus. However, recent mining and forestry conflicts in Sweden have at least partially questioned Peterson’s interpretation. Contemporary conflicts have become increasingly confrontational in society and in the media, and this change, if perhaps still only contingent, can be seen as an expression of repolitisisation (see Anshelm et al., 2018; Anshelm & Haikola, 2018; Andersson & Westholm, 2019; see also Lindahl et al., 2017; Skydda skogen, 2021).

Agonistic differences in recent resource conflicts have been broadly publicised in Sweden. In other words, in these cases solving disagreements has not been successful enough in the sphere of policy-making, before proceeding to the realm of politics. The cases show, and Anshelm et al. (2018) confirm, that strict demarcation of policy and politics is difficult, if not impossible. The question, however, remains: how agonistic can the efforts of consensus through management be in the end? Or, to put it in another way, is consensus governance in the sphere of policy-making just a means of depoliticisation – the type of governance that has been questioned in the most recent civic efforts of repoliticisation? These are the questions I’ll return to at the end of this chapter.

In contrast, according to Peterson (2004), Finnish management culture favours powerful leaders who often communicate in a straightforward manner in a patriarchal atmosphere. Executives are “securely positioned, and they govern with authority and charisma” (Ibid., p. 229). This type of decision-making culture is perhaps gradually diminishing in Finland but, especially in the forest industry, changes are slow and contain drawbacks (see Raitio, 2008; Takala et al., 2019, 2022). For example, in their study of the key contradictions of the Finnish bioeconomy in the 2010s, Ahlqvist and Sirviö (2020) specify the role of the state in homogenising its territory through the manipulation of space and time. Certain urban cores are according to this view serving as state’s strategic command centres, others acting as production units, and some parcels functioning as resource peripheries (Ibid., p. 398–399). Hence, state space is regarded as the platform for the material manifestation of the bioeconomy. Frontier-making is, according to Ahlqvist and Sirviö, “a constitutive spatial moment of capitalism to unlock the potential of endless accumulation” (Ibid., p. 400). This type of accumulation policy further deepens capitalism in and through nature, especially through the appropriation of “cheap nature”. Ahlqvist and Sirviö, inspired by Jason W. Moore (2015), conclude that capitalism is, among many other things, a way of organising nature.

Interestingly, Ahlqvist and Sirviö (2020) include an ideological element of frontier mentality in their analysis which refers to a kind of collective will, or a “civic religion” (Ibid., p. 404), which motivates and legitimises the taming of nature through hard work for the national benefit and the leading export industry. This was and is, according to them, “consensual domestic imperialism” that became manifested in the expansive colonisation of Finland’s forests and waterways (Ibid., p. 404). In this way the entire state space turned into a unified economic entity (Ibid., p. 406). Consequently, Ahlqvist and Sirviö argue, politicisation takes place wherever and whenever we, while proceeding with the taming of domestic nature, open spaces for novel ways of valorising natural resources, reviving local economies, rescaling production technologies and by integrating research orientations with resource orientations (Ibid., p. 408).

As witnessed, the Swedish management model is far from perfect, and sometimes it is unsuccessful, as the study of Ojnareskogen in Gotland by Anshelm et al. (2018) exemplifies. However, the conflict gradually grew into an important learning process. As Anshelm et al. (2018) specify, the mining resistance unfolded various effective ways of (re)politicising the areas of society that were depoliticised under Swedish management culture and through neoliberal environmental governance (Ibid., p. 207). According to them, environmental politicisation takes place by reframing the local conflict setting through actor alliances, discourse coalitions and juridical processes. Actor alliances proceed through horizontal links with other resistance groups and vertical links with related translocal actors. Consequently, discourse coalitions emerge by co-linking different but related agendas, world views and ideologies when there is “frame resonance” with, for example, NGO’s, government agencies and university researchers. Juridical processes can, finally, take the form of court appeals and, hence, employ national and supranational frameworks (Ibid., p. 211).

Takala et al. (2020), on the other hand, emphasise the role of mass media in (re)politicising forest management by offering visibility to subordinate discourses. According to their study, the political of forest issues was virtually absent from the Finnish print media during the late twentieth century, but a clear change took place in the early 2000s. In addition to hegemonic extraction-oriented media articles, subordinate socially and environmentally oriented contributions gained wider publicity. Their media research showed that mass media can greatly modify the debates and narrations of forest policy and, what is of central importance, the media is potentially less interested in consensus than presenting alternative perspectives and open disagreement.

To summarise, what role does agonism have, and can have, in supporting and forwarding (re)politicisation? Could it help unlock the political vacuums of contemporary environmental governance? Advocates of agonistic politics emphasise that tensions and conflicts should not be regarded as troublesome nuisances. Instead, they should be seen as elementary features of decision-making. Contradictory preferences and contrasting arguments are highly valued in societies that endure and favour open dissension and inconsistencies. Participation in democratic settings can respect pluralistic and polyphonic decision-making which proceeds through disagreement and puzzles that cannot be solved. Open disagreement can become emancipatory if only giving up the motives of a shared value base – if only relaxing from the strive toward common ground (Häkli & Kallio, 2017). This condensation nicely resonates with Chantal Mouffe’s argument for an agonistic pluralism in her The Return of the Political, initially published in 1993: “[T]he political…must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition” (Mouffe, 1993/2020, p. 3).

Agonistic pluralism resonates well with the conceptualisation of ‘pluriverse’, which refers to “a rainbow of cosmologies, knowledges and vital worlds” (Paulson, 2018, p. 90). Pluriversal thinking, which celebrates “multiple ways of being and knowing that have co-evolved in relations to power and difference” (Ibid., p. 90, see also Kothari et al., 2019), affords an inspiring imaginary to the promoters of agonistic participation. Pluriversal agonism emerges, in my view, from within the acts of (re)politicisation taking shape through the multitude. The multitude of pluriverse is then, if leaning on Thomas Hobbes (1651/1991, pp. 117–121) and Hardt and Negri (2000, pp. xv–xvi), made of the geography of alternatives emerging from within the creative forces of democratisation and emancipation (Lehtinen, 2006, p. 88).

Pluriversal agonism, or agonistic pluralism, relies on general and contextual analyses of knowledge and power. It therefore evolves via the updating by critical studies on, for example, the conditions of consensus, thresholds of participation, unjust hierarchies (of position and truth), existence of divergences and events of non-communication (Häkli & Kallio, 2017; Kaakinen & Lehtinen, 2016). Studies of agonistic pluralism often focus on components and edges that accentuate dissenting positions and therefore increase the inability of actors to understand and communicate with one another. In some cases, the existence of divergences has turned into something that cannot be cured via, for example, intensified collaboration. Value differences can, instead, be regarded as the foundation and means of (re)politicisation (Kaakinen & Lehtinen, 2016, p. 107).

Matthew Sawatzky (2013, 2017), a Canadian geographer who completed his doctoral thesis on Manitoban forest use at the University of Eastern Finland, underlines that the problem actually begins with contrasting and clashing perceptions of forests – thus, under the contested and partially non-communicating practices of claiming and placing nature. The degree of dissonance depends on what we think a forest is and how we should use it. Sawatzky, while inspired by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2006), clarifies the forestry puzzle in Manitoba with the concept of chiasm. Chiasm is, for him, a place of convergence and divergence, where we and our perceptions meet. Chiasm is therefore, according to Sawatzky, “an inherently geographic concept – a gap or space in which we simultaneously engage with the world and others” (Sawatzky, 2017, p. 19). Chiasm is the topos where the acts of depoliticisation and (re)politicisation meet; where the acts of socio-spatial repression and withdrawal become manifested – and moreover, wherefrom to start studying the continuous restructuring of the contemporary tendencies of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion.

The scholars of Nordic politics of nature have, as witnessed above, thoroughly examined the socio-spatial constitution of what Sawatzky terms chiasms. This has taken place both in the analyses of resource conflicts and in the studies of urban and regional planning issues. They have identified the differing motives and procedures of defining nature by scrutinising the variation of routes and routines in nature’s placing. In addition, they have joined those critical actors who have warned about the risk of ignoring ecological constraints and uncontrollable feedback that are due to extraction practices. Moreover, Nordic scholars have participated in the debates where the necessities and stages of societal transition have been developed.

In other words, Nordic geographers have supported the processes of (re)politicising nature, that is: unveiling the socio-spatial forces, moves and motives behind the production of chiasmatic settings. Accordingly, they have also shown the techniques of postpolitics and risks of depolitisation in those governance cultures that favour consensual and technocratic decision-making. Finally, Nordic scholars have also shown the existence of unpolitical vacuums in decision-making attached to resource extraction and urban planning. These vacuums have been treated as expressions of traditions where decision-making culture is still loaded by patrimonial administrative routines, as is the case in certain areas of forestry planning and urban development in Finland (see Lehtinen, 2018a; Raitio, 2008; Takala et al., 2019, 2022). According to these studies, politicisation takes place when and where (apparently) unpolitical patrimonialism occupies a hegemonic position, whereas acts of repoliticisation turn against the purposeful acts of depoliticisation.

To summarise, Nordic scholarship in this field of socio-spatial studies has most innovatively contributed to the geographical conceptualisation of “plural natures”. Already since the 1980s, this has been associated with formulations of “social natures” (see Lehtinen, 1991; Seppänen, 1986). The particular Nordic ‘content’ of this has most clearly taken shape in studies dealing with socio-spatial tensions and their resolution linked both to particular urban socio-environmentalism and resource conflicts related to forestry and mining and, to a certain extent, oil-based development. Interestingly, similar progress took place within the trans-Atlantic circles of critical geography, both in connection to socio-environmental justice issues (Harvey, 1996) and as part of the introductory launches of social nature (Braun & Castree, 1998).

Nordic Landings

The above summary of some Nordic contributions on the depoliticisation and (re)politicisation of nature demonstrates how country-specific contexts affect research emphases and orientations. In general, issues related to forestry and mining are favoured in Finland and Sweden whereas oil-based development has gained primary concern in Norway. As was also witnessed, resource management cultures slightly vary between the countries and this has affected research compositions. In addition, samhällsgeografi has been developed from within a bit differing angles in the Nordic countries (Lehtinen & Simonsen, 2022).

Therefore, accordingly, inspiration from wider international research circles is as a rule received and further developed in relation to each researcher’s scholarly location in national research networks (Christiansen et al., 1999; Mertz et al., 2018; Widgren et al., 2011). In Norway, as the case studies referred to above exemplify (see especially Haarstad, 2016), the dynamics and constraints of carbonscapes have served as an arena whereupon the folding and unfolding of the politics of nature are examined. This focusing is rather unavoidable, almost necessary, keeping in mind the central economic role of oil and gas production in the country. However, it also reveals the strategic confusion, if not decoupling, characterising the Norwegian politics of nature: carbon dependencies are contrasted and, in a way, balanced with the forceful investments in post-fossil reorganisation of city regions.

At the same time, however, climate change research in general seems to have gradually shaken off its critical and regulative orientation and, instead, become more committed to the fabrication of adaptation techniques (see O’Brien, 2012, pp. 668–669, 2015). As part of this trend, descriptive methods have become increasingly popular in Norwegian geography research on climate issues, and it is today rare to find contributions linked to the needs of regulating the core areas of the country’s economy (Lehtinen, 2018b, c). This is a rather significant change, especially when assessing it against the tradition of Norwegian human geography as a critical social science (Åquist, 1994; Asheim, 1979, 1985; Sæther, 1999). The question of financing and governing research on climate-related issues is highly political, of course, as the country is committed to expanding oil and gas production in those Arctic Sea areas that are under its control.

In Sweden, as the cases above exemplify, the tradition of seeking political agreements as part of administrative duties has been challenged in some of the most recent resource conflicts. According to these case studies, no clear division of labour between policy and politics can always be identified. The type of managing of concerns and claims, which to a certain degree has characterised the more general Scandinavian model of governance (see Donner-Amnell, 2001; Peterson, 2004; Sæther, 2004), has prioritised high ambitions and demand for administrative preparation. The most recent signs of repoliticisation in resource conflicts refer to growing civic pressure for change in this model. The concern has been raised about the consequences of transparency gaps in the type of governance cultures that aim at strategic and political solutions already in the phase of administrative preparation. What if this well-established and highly appreciated form of consensus management only serves as a central bearer of depoliticisation? These worries, ardently brought up in the currently heated forestry and mining conflicts (see Anshelm et al., 2018; Anshelm & Haikola, 2018; Skydda skogen, 2021) perhaps serve as expressions of an ongoing turning of the tide. As Lindahl et al. (2017, p. 54) concluded from their detailed analysis of the Swedish forestry model, “[t]here is a need for broad public debate, not only about the role of forest in future society but also about the understanding and operationalisation of sustainable development.”

On the other hand, the Finnish decision-making model differs in many respects from its Scandinavian counterparts (see Ahlqvist & Sirviö, 2020; Humalisto, 2014; Peterson, 2004). It is not rare to find characterisations of the Finnish decision-making culture on nature-use as strikingly straightforward and, I would suggest, prepolitical (see Raitio, 2008). Tendencies of repoliticisation do exist but, in places, practices from the patrimonial past run the scene. Both the patrons of leading companies and professional experts in public administration have, by tradition, a powerful role in decisions of public interest. In forest sector practices, moreover, the tradition of authoritarian programming has continued in the 2010s, under the postpolitical banner of bioeconomy expansion (Takala et al., 2020). In fact, as is argued by Kellokumpu and Sirviö (2022) in their analysis of the relations between the Finnish forest industry and the state administration, definitions of public interest often serve as means of depolitisation. This is run by powerful extra-parliamentary actors aiming at broadening their respective regime spaces.

The partial return to the old habits of hegemony in Finland (see Lehtinen, 1991) has reintroduced earlier antagonisms between forest industry, nature conservation and non-timber branches of the forest economy. The documented decoupling between the marketing of multi-objective forestry ideals and the actual highly intensive forestry practices has left the debate arena in a confusing setting. Bioeconomy critics find it difficult to participate in the debate run by the marketing motives of the forest sector. Concentrating on the details of branding politics, for example, is deemed a waste of time – when there are more serious and acute questions to be solved in the sphere of actual forest use (see Meidän metsämme, 2021). Proof of biodiversity losses and diminishing carbon sinks, for example, need to be gathered by the critics themselves, and they are often working on a voluntary basis. Distrust and antagonism appear to be growing, and shadowing the agonistic options of open and constructive disagreement (see Säynäjäkangas & Kellokumpu, 2020; Hyvärinen, 2020, pp. 26–27; Takala et al., 2021).

The few inter-Nordic comparisons I could found for my analysis (see Donner-Amnell, 2001; Humalisto, 2014; Peterson, 2004) much confirm the above-identified differentiation of resource management models. Peterson (2004) compared the Swedish and Finnish models of decision-making in the forest industry and found a clear differentiation between Finnish strive for technological competence and Swedish ambitions for market expansion. Niko Humalisto (2014) compared the Swedish and Finnish strategies for promoting biofuel assembling, and his observations further specified Peterson’s remarks: Finnish biofuel development is highly dependent on the operative motives of leading forest and energy companies. In Sweden, on the contrary, regional variation and flexibility is favoured and this has led to a more effective utilisation of development options.

These views support Jakob Donner-Amnell’s (2001) comparative cross-country reflection derived from his detailed analyses of Nordic forest companies. According to him, Swedish success in forest sector development is due to a rather “liberal” model of decision-making which has carefully reflected upon the concerns of the forest industry as a whole, including medium- and small-sized companies. In contrast, according to Donner-Amnell (2001, pp. 110–113), the Finnish model is characterised by a “productionist” approach which is dominated by the country’s leading companies performing like “isolated hierarchies”. In addition, his analysis of Norway underlines the features of the underdevelopment of the forest sector as a whole, suffering from low esteem – conditions which did not, however, prevent the international success of Norske Skog at the turn of the century (see also Sæther, 2004).

In conclusions I will shortly deal with the consequences of the Nordic differentiation in research orientations (in this field of research). I will in general consider the inter-Nordic bearing of geography under the contemporary pressures of academic productivity contests and evaluations.

Conclusions

The discussion of Nordic contributions on the politicisation of nature in this chapter demonstrates the significant influence of continental and trans-Atlantic advancements. These linkages have widely enriched the epistemological rethinking in Nordic research communities and this renewal has taken advantage of local and country-specific circumstances (Mertz et al., 2018; Widgren et al., 2011). However, local and country-specific re-working of continental and trans-Atlantic advances has resulted in partial voids in inter-Nordic cross-inspiration. Nordic geographers do still meet in their biannual conferences as well as in specific project gatherings, but it is not often that they meet in their research publications. Cross-country references are rare in Nordic contributions on the politicisation of nature.

This state of affairs is, foremostly, an outcome of general changes in the politics and practices of scientific publishing and funding. But it is also due to our choices as individual scholars and research groups. Striving for visibility in the most highly ranked journals, published by the “Big Five” (Kallio, 2017), certainly affects the order of preferences in our references. Especially, the practices of peer-reviewing tend to guide us to the global anglophone “core” (Paasi, 2013), often at the cost of more pluriversal assembling. However, I cannot see any unequivocal obstacles to develop and employ more effectively inter-Nordic reciprocity in research and publishing efforts. It could even broaden our understanding of the interrelations of the geographies near and far – and it could also slightly tone down the current trans-Atlantic hegemony.

The strengthening of inter-Nordic reciprocity could also enrich methodological reflections. The above scanning of the politicisation of nature literature unveiled a varied arsenal of approaches and conceptual clarifications. The epistemological move toward plural natures took place in the 1980s, as part of the more general constructionist-lingual turn in human geography and neighbouring social sciences. Critical and constructionist approaches were developed jointly, and much of this took place in the pages of the journal Nordisk Samhällsgeografisk Tidskrift. The type of continuation and co-enrichment was then a characteristically Nordic phenomenon. We did not get stuck in an antagonism between social theory and cultural studies, as was then the case in trans-Atlantic anglophone geography (Lehtinen & Simonsen, 2022). The agonistic attitude perhaps also eased the later linking of critical historical materialist and neomaterialist approaches, a connection which has been forcefully elaborated by Finnish scholars. In this respect, the decades-long co-advancement of yhteiskuntamaantiede, the Finnish equivalent to the Swedish samhällsgeografi (societal geography), has gained a firm hold in the country, extending from initial formulations by Perttu Vartiainen (1979, 1984, 1986, 1987) and subsequently enriched (see Ahlqvist & Sirviö, 2020; Alhojärvi, 2021; Humalisto, 2014; Hyvärinen, 2020; Kellokumpu, 2021; Kellokumpu & Sirviö, 2022; Luukkonen & Sirviö, 2019; Moisio, 2011, 2018; Säynäjäkangas & Kellokumpu, 2020).

In the Nordic setting, however, the vigour of epistemological co-enrichment has diminished. According to the case studies cited above, the socio-spatial re-conceptualisations of oil assemblages, manners of (de)politicisation, displacement of politics, regime contests, frontiers of extraction, cheap natures, traps of provincialism, spaces of non-communication, chiasmatic relations and politics of pluriversal agonism have been developed in connection to ‘local’ renewals within continental and trans-Atlantic circles. Nordic geographies of the 2020s will undoubtedly continue this integration in the wider currents of geography’s disciplinary and post-disciplinary reorientation. Scaling-up is important and necessary, especially when attached to corresponding sensitivity: reciprocal learning across scales upwards and downwards – and across borders between neighbouring countries. For example, a highly radical experiment of this type of border-crossing is the book length study (527 pp.) of Kent, the famous indie band from Sweden, by Hannu Linkola, a Finnish geographer. The book (Linkola, 2017) provides an eye-opening view of Eskilstuna, and the whole of Sweden.

My closing conclusion is consequently related to the outcomes of weakening “Nordicity” in geographical imagination. Distancing from our nearest neighbours, if it continues, might easily result in geographical narrowing. It could easily lock us into a provincial position where scholarly rethinking is increasingly impelled by trends afforded by the trans-Atlantic centres of geography renewal. Provincialism, as I have argued elsewhere (Lehtinen, 2006, pp. 200–201), is fuelled by the atmosphere of submission and opportunism under the imperial pressure of neoliberal displacement. Instead, the optional co-imagination gained while leaning on colleagues in the neighbourhood could strengthen our sense of pluriversal and polyglot geographies. It could lead us to recognise the potential of the multitude within the plurality of spaces. It could, in other words, help us to unfold the options of concerted action and activities (Wekerle & Classens, 2021). In addition, the verve of these activities necessarily extends down to the geographies of our lived everyday. Concerted action is, by definition, political in nature. It evolves as part of the practices of involvement and activism. In an era of planetary emergencies, the societal relevance of our geographies should be ranked high in our preference lists. We would be wise to remember that samhällsgeografi initially was radical (e.g. Buch-Hansen et al., 1975; Axelsson et al., 1980; Rouhinen, 1981; in this book, see also Jakobsen and Larsen, 2022). Today, under the pressure of the deep socio-environmental crises in which we are embedded, such a radical temper would be more than welcome.