The End of Change as We Know It: How cities figure out what the problem is with climate governance

This article-based dissertation studies how city organisations in Finland know how to govern climate change. Global heating and environmental disruptions have placed governance organisations like cities into circumstances with which they are not historically structured to deal. In an attempt to retain longevity and remain functional in the face of the widely uncertain ramifications and to abide by international agreements on climate change mitigation goals, governance apparatuses have had to accumulate vast amounts of data and concentrated expertise on climatic and ecological issues. Yet, the longstanding dilemma of knowing just how to apportion and take on a paradigmatically complex and ‘wicked’ problem such as climate change remains. Wicked problems, as originally defined in the 1970s in a critique of the then contemporary theory and practice of urban planning, undermine all efforts to govern them. Wickedness augured a crisis of control over the proliferation of issues that escape the means of rational planning and governing. As advanced modern societies found themselves differentiating beyond the point of keeping the unpredictable consequences of technoscientific advances in check, they still held on to the dubious promise of remedying this self-inflicted condition of reflexive modernisation. The extensive and intertwined consequences of fossil fuel-inflamed climate heating are emblematic of the irresolvable problems that nonetheless demand governance organisations to confront them.

The immediate question that this condition begs is to determine the problem that climate change poses for modern governance. The thesis outlines a reasoning as to why answering the question in a sociologically grounded way requires problematising the very notion of problems. First, wickedness is a problematisation of a modern societal condition that produces unresolvable issues that escape definitions and stopping rules. Second, contemporary scholarship on wicked problems is ripe with critiques of the very concept, much in the spirit of reflexivity; governance needs to accept and adapt to the overwhelming complexity it faces by apportioning it into doable problems and finding flexible and creative ways to gain small wins. The terrain of the research conducted in the thesis begins here, with a third problematisation of turning reflexive scrutiny and epistemic efforts onto governance itself as a kind of knowing. Consequently, the main research question can be presented in a second-order form: how does governing itself come to be known as problematic in the practices of knowing and acting on climate change?

The articles that present the empirical research in the thesis are sociological operationalisations of this third and ultimate problematisation. They inquire into three subthemes: how climate and environmental knowledge is processed in and passed through the governance practices of city organisations; how the everyday work of climate governance is experienced and negotiated by municipal experts; and how the future is made knowable and governable through scenario techniques in policymaking. The empirical material comprises 21 interviews with experts in five Finnish municipal organisations working with climate change, environmental issues and preparedness, along with observations and transcripts of a scenario-based, climate crisis policymaking exercise conducted with leading politicians and sectoral experts of the City of Helsinki, including 10 post hoc interviews conducted with the participants. These data provide an outlook on the various forms of knowing climate change that are incorporated into the practices of governance in city organisations and the precariousness of trying to gain control of futures that constantly escape efforts to know and contain them.

The research shows that climate governance is an established yet resolutely auxiliary practice in Finnish cities. While knowledge of climate and environmental change is actively gathered and worked on as part of governance processes, climate concerns end up enclosed and sidelined into organisational peripheries and, at best, concurrent projects. Even if climate concerns circulate across governance sectors and find translations to propel them to gain in significance in, for example, future- probing roadmaps or marketing campaigns, they are overridden and kept at arm’s length from core practices of budgeting and planning in sectors that are not primarily concerned with climate issues. A key explanation for this is found in the temporal organisation, or rhythmics, of governance. Frictions of rhythms between practices evince divergent strains of institutionalisation, whether of further congealing sector-bound hierarchies or of manoeuvres to sow the seeds of alternative ways to conceive of municipal organisations as climate actors. In both cases, it is the climate experts who come to personify the cities’ environmental concerns and thus to bear the brunt of discordances and inertia involved in pushing climate issues onto organisational agendas. Strikingly, these compartmentalising tendencies are even more pronounced when transposed to the context of imaginative, explicitly future-oriented governance. The analysis of a scenario exercise with the City of Helsinki shows politicians curtailing the scope of how uncertain futures could be governed. They knowingly acknowledge the disastrous ramifications of climate change while reducing policymaking to vigilant problem-solving in a perpetually extended present. The two realities can co-exist with oblivious ease when kept separate and not allowed to be combined so that the former would be permitted to compel the practice of the latter.

The results lead to the conclusion that the potential of city governance to exhibit alternative practices and generative change in the face of climate change lies in the precarious pockets of everyday administrative environmental work rather than in the realm of future-oriented, imaginative probing. The ultimate frontier of reflexivity proves not to be climate change as a problem that must be matched with adaptive partial solutions, but rather the meaning of change in and of governance. The articles show that the ways in which city governance knows itself resist change by the very nature of its organisation. The analytical approaches taken across the thesis are geared towards understanding this recalcitrance and problematising the ways in which we might reconfigure the means and ends of governance that keep deflecting an already irreversible change that has no known precedent.