Regions as well as their identities and borders are social and discursive constructs that are produced and removed in contested, historically contingent and context-bound processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. This article studies the deinstitutionalization of regions in the context of municipality amalgamations and the…

We present a rural Finnish case of nature conservation called the nature values trade (NVT) as an example of the process of changing ecological and cultural states and preferences of environmental policy. We emphasise the importance of local ecological and cultural circumstances for the formulation of environmental policy. The study shows how…

The farmers' role within the EU has recently been under reconstruction: in addition to primary agricultural production farmers should fulfill multiple functions such as maintaining the rural landscape, conserving nature and providing services. One essential feature of this new role is the demand for entrepreneurship. Farmers should be capable of…

This paper focuses on the representation of post-productive countryside in Finland by exploring how the rural is presented in the context of second home tourism. Being an integral part of rural areas and their history, second homes are an established example of the post-productive consumption of countryside. The international and Finnish…

Rural bioenergy production is currently a much debated question worldwide. It is closely connected to questions of environmental protection and rural development in both developing and industrial world. In Finland, rural bioenergy production has traditionally meant the production of wood fuels for heating purposes. The utilisation of forest…

One of the main challenges of European environmental policies is to recruit local-level actors to fulfill set targets. This article explores how targets of European agri-environmental policy have been achieved in Finland. It also analyses how implementation practices produce conditions for agri-environmental management and how policy success-or…

Analysis of georeferenced population data for Finland, 1970-2000, showed that rural youth, particularly rural young women, have been moving out of sparsely populated areas to growth centers and more densely populated areas in general. Interview data from young people included attitudes toward migration versus staying put, usually related to…