Imagining energy transitions: carbon neutrality in Finland

In this dissertation, I examine how societal debates on energy policy and the necessity of energy transitions unfold in Finland. Transforming energy systems is acknowledged as one of the most important areas for action on climate change and numerous voices across the globe have called for radical shifts in current energy policies and practices. Simultaneously, discussions on energy policy revolve around futures – both expected and feared – and the measures required to attain them. Finland is an interesting context to study claims about change and transitions as it has both commitments to action on climate change as well as stable institutional structures that have been described as resistant to change.

My perspective on energy policy and governance is broad and I analyse various arenas where energy issues are debated. These include the Finnish Parliament and Helsinki City Council, the media and discussions amongst various actors attempting to influence energy policy and working at the science-policy interface. In my analysis, I show how Finnish energy policy actors are broadly committed to a sociotechnical imaginary of carbon neutrality, or a collectively held and publicly performed vision of a desirable future. In the imaginary, Finland is envisioned as a prosperous welfare society that has addressed climate change by attaining a balance between greenhouse gas emissions and removals. The imaginary of carbon neutrality is broad and interpretatively flexible, thus accommodating diverse views on what carbon neutrality can entail.

In the articles that comprise this dissertation, I engage with a wide range of literature from science and technology studies, sociotechnical transitions studies, social scientific studies on energy, institutional theory and analyses on science-society relations. Specifically in the thesis summary, I address a research gap within the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries, by examining how questions regarding scale, heterogeneity and mobility shape the co-production of imaginaries as well as enable and curtail the scope of agency. I build on a constructivist and interpretative approach to research and use a range of materials, such as interviews, documents, news articles, Parliamentary and City Council transcripts, press releases and participant observation. Empirically, I focus on the 2010s as the decade when a sociotechnical imaginary of carbon neutrality emerged and became consolidated in Finland.

In this thesis, I argue that sociotechnical imaginaries, in this case carbon neutrality, form the imaginative foundations of national policy debates that motivate and justify action, while simultaneously retaining space for negotiation on how to attain those futures. The empirical analysis demonstrates that there is no overarching consensus in Finland over what carbon neutrality means and what practices it allows for. I demonstrate that the context where an imaginary is co-produced both enables and constrains the scope of possible political debate and action by requiring actors to formulate their views through interpretations of desirable pathways towards carbon neutrality.

I conclude that carbon neutrality is likely to persist as a widely shared sociotechnical imaginary in Finland due to the political possibilities for debate and compromise that it offers. At the same time, I propose that the concept of carbon neutrality will be increasingly challenged by questioning whose imaginary is it, what type of practices does it enable and how are different actions evaluated as carbon neutral. Likewise new concepts, such as climate emergency, are likely to challenge the imaginary of carbon neutrality. I conclude that such debates are both necessary and desirable as we collectively face, address and learn to live with climate change.