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Preadaptative Transactions and Institutional Change: Wolf‐critical activism in southwestern Finland
Author(s) -
Hiedanpää Juha,
Pellikka Jani
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
environmental policy and governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.987
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1756-9338
pISSN - 1756-932X
DOI - 10.1002/eet.1754
Subject(s) - cognitive reframing , grassroots , government (linguistics) , politics , epistemic community , ethnography , political science , institutional change , sociology , political economy , public administration , law , social psychology , anthropology , psychology , linguistics , philosophy
Finland has had problems protecting the grey wolf ( Canis lupus ) for decades. Over the past few years, the government of Finland has taken several steps to improve its policy on wolves. In this paper, we explore the grassroots activism that institutional adjustments have triggered. This work builds on ethnographic presence in two southwestern Finnish wolf territories. Theoretically, we draw from institutional theory and use transactions as the unit of analysis. We identify four ways in which wolf‐critical civil society has provided an institutional basis for particular changes: (i) questioning the purity of the wolf, (ii) making scientific evidence fallible, (iii) producing negative emotional effects and (iv) maintaining strong policy pressure against the presence of the wolf. In the discussion, we explain how these modifications have functioned. Actors critical of the wolf have exercised the politics of disturbance, produced various epistemic cues and created conditions for reframing existing rights and the emergence of new ones. Due to these bottom‐up preadaptive transactions, wolf‐policy‐related institutional adjustments have, in many respects, taken on volitional and spontaneous features. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment