Nordic Environmental State in the Making? A Practice View of the Green Transition

This chapter deals with the current drivers of change in Nordic environmental policy. The model of the environmental state serves here as the conceptual reference, which we examine at the local level, since cities increasingly appear as key policy players in the governance of global environmental challenges. We utilise a practice-oriented approach to understand how environmental concerns work at the city level and evoke opportunities for sustainable urban development. It was found that while city-level policies attempt to answer global environmental challenges, they simultaneously produce new types of inclusivity problems. Our illustrative examples of Finnish climate and biodiversity policies also highlight the difference in the dynamics of climate change implementation versus the realisation of biodiversity policy issues. Environmental policies have grown to be part of the multi-level governance system, starting from international-level agreements and being implemented on the national, regional and city levels. Yet, the discussion on the environmental state should identify the ways in which material growth can be transformed into qualitative changes that make ecological transformation possible.