The YHYS 2024 Fall Colloquium is The Annual Meeting of the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science. This year it will be hosted by LUT University Business School and will convene in Lappeenranta, Finland, on 27-29 November 2024.
Call for abstracts now open! Deadline 16th September
Browse the sessions below and read the descriptions to learn more. To submit to a session, please email the appropriate contact listed in the description. Each session is uniquely organized by the session chairs so there is no set format across the sessions. Submissions can be in Finnish or English language, unless otherwise specified.
Any queries about the submissions, please refer those to the session chairs via the listed contact email. Any queries about the colloquium in general, please get in touch via admin.yhys2024@lut.fi
The politics, practices, and organising of ecological restoration and its effects on land use, future threats, and aspirations
Session Chairs: Ossi I. Ollinaho, Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki; Sophia Hagolani-Albov, Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki
Submissions: ossi.ollinaho@helsinki.fi
Since 2015, the world has seen a surge of ecological restoration (ER) pledges, policies, and projects—typically related to different types of tree planting, motivated by stopping land degradation and deforestation, acquiring carbon credits and boosting biodiversity and food production. Yet, more empirical research is needed to uncover what is happening where and why; focusing on the politics, practices, and organising of ER and the associated effects on land use. We want to uncover how ER schemes interrelate with the financial realm, land use conflicts, and power relations. We will focus on ER schemes in the global South. However, as ER schemes often have a global reach due to ‘green economy’ supply chains, this might also entail scrutinizing practices in the global North to more fully understand the aspirations and threats involved in ER.
The ER practices linked to global financial flows are typically problematic in their effects on land use as top-down restoration practices tend to be incommensurate with local practices and traditional livelihoods. Many rural communities in the global South have lost control over their lands by virtue of carbon credit mechanisms. As many livelihoods in the global South countries are often still directly dependent on land use, the schemes that do not maintain or improve the access to the land tend to be problematic, fail or both. Changes in climatic conditions are also relevant as the proliferation of extreme weather conditions such as droughts, cyclones, and flooding cause increased uncertainty in land use. How could ER address these—seemingly inexorable—insidious changes? How should guidelines for ‘good’ politics, practices, and organizing, as well as articulating future aspirations related to ER be conceptualized?
We invite papers addressing these issues from the global, local, or regional perspective. Papers can be case-based studies (comparative or in-depth), theoretical or review papers.