Speaker
Description
In Finland, the established institutional frameworks and practices of spatial governance have generated a fairly stable regional order of core-periphery relations. Now this order is being challenged by the green transition and associated new technologies and market opportunities. Areas formerly peripheral have emerged as new centres of attention for green investments. What are the institutional and practice implications of these shifts in regional economy to spatial governance, both at the national and local level? How is this development understood in the central government, and brought forward to guiding and incentivising regional development? How do local governments in affected regions react to these changes and navigate amidst them, in view of tapping into the scales, networks and institutional resources they bring forth?
Drawing on Discursive Institutionalism and Practice Theory, we conceptualise institutions as dynamic systems evolving through the interplay of ideas, norms, and policies. New ideas of spatial governance, e.g., related to the green transition, rarely institutionalise so as to replace former institutions, but rather generate a new institutional layer of spatial governance and lead to hybridisation of spatialities. By examining accounts of local and national planning interactions, we identify patterns of institutional and policy adaptation and spatial reconfiguration in accommodating to the green transition and related sustainability discourses. We contribute to spatial planning and governance research by offering conceptual tools to sort out the complex geographies of established and emerging spatial discourses in the era of green transition.
| Keywords | Discursive institutionalism; practice theory; hybrid spatiality; Finland; strategic navigation |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
