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While the role of projects in sustainability change is widely recognized, the understanding of project managers’ behaviour in sustainability projects is limited. We examine project champions who act without hierarchical and authoritative power as environmental leaders and drive sustainability-related changes in the mindsets of actors and in city administration. Based on longitudinal action research, we elaborate on the practices and characteristics of project champions in initiating and advancing the circular economy in a city organization. Our study contributes to the intersection of research on project champions and environmental leaders by increasing the understanding of the ways through which champions develop their potency to promote sustainability in the course of the project. publishedVersion

The evolution of environmental policy is increasingly driven by the emergence and interaction of policy concepts and the frameworks, knowledge, and ideas they employ. We argue that policy actors’ creative use of policy concepts often leads to their combinatorial development. In this policy process, the concepts interact and shape each other’s policy relevance and future development under the influence of ideas, knowledge, and political factors. We formulate this new research approach using ideational and policy process theories. In particular, we explicate internal and contextual combinatory elements that enable policy change resulting from mutual development of policy concepts. For an empirical demonstration, we analyze the conceptual innovation, rise, and ramifications of nutrient recycling as a new segment of Finnish environmental policy. publishedVersion

This case study examines how stakeholder engagement supports the process of generating urban ecosystem services. As our empirical case, we study the Vuores stormwater system in a new urban residential district in Finland. The Vuores site is interesting and valuable for a case study, as it is one of the most comprehensive urban stormwater systems in Finland and it generates a variety of ecosystem services. The empirical data consists of interviews with 10 planners and designers of the Vuores site, representing both public and private organizations. Qualitative content analysis is used in the data analysis. The findings of the study present how the key stakeholders, namely business organizations, the public sector and the local community, engage within the case. The case study provides a deep understanding of stakeholder engagement, that is, the aims, practices and outcomes of stakeholder relationships, in the process of generating urban ecosystem services. publishedVersion

The temporary use of vacant spaces has become integrated into formal urban development practices. This paper seeks to explore the catalytic power of temporary urbanism for sustainable urban development by focusing on the tension between temporary and permanent and the dynamics through which temporary urbanism becomes catalytic. The case study focuses on a six-year experimental period of the Hiedanranta brownfield until the city started to build the area for a new residential district in Tampere, Finland. Rich details of temporary urbanism were achieved through interviews with 27 city developers and experimental participants. The analysis revealed three tracks of catalytic mechanisms of temporary urbanism emerging from the persistent tension between temporary and permanent. By demonstrating the origins of catalytic power, this research contributes to academic and practical interests to find productive relationships between temporary urbanism, planning and sustainability governance in cities. publishedVersion

Stakeholder theory has grown into one of the most frequent approaches to organizational sustainability. Stakeholder research has provided considerable insight on organization–nature relations, and advanced approaches that consider the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. However, nonhuman nature is typically approached as an ambiguous, unified entity. Taking nonhumans adequately into account requires greater detail for both grounding the status of nonhumans and particularizing nonhuman entities as a set of potential organizational stakeholders with different characteristics, vulnerabilities, and needs. We utilize the philosophical concept of ‘recognition’ to provide a normative underpinning for stakeholder theorizing on nonhuman nature in both universal and difference-sensitive terms. We discuss how the status model of recognition helps identify relevant nonhumans as organizational stakeholders, establish respect, and particularize nonhumans in their distinctiveness and in partner-like ways. The implications of the recognition approach for stakeholder research are explicated with an illustrative case that exemplifies the recognition and particularization of nonhuman nature. We contribute to stakeholder research on nonhuman nature by suggesting that recognition provides a conceptual tool for theorizing the stakeholder status and particularization of nonhuman nature. Thereby, this article reduces anthropocentric bias and increases the capacity of stakeholder theorizing to confront the challenges of the ecological crisis.

This paper examines the micro-scale ignition of sustainability pathways in multi-actor collaboration in an urban living lab in Tampere, Finland, and aims to capture the reconfigurations that lead to urban sustainability. The conventional model of sustainability focusing on economic, environmental and social pillars does not correspond to the dynamic nature of urban sustainability. Thus, we utilise a sustainability framework that is more sensitive to urban conditions and compatible with a temporal typology of practices carried out by diverse actors in the living lab. The results show, first, that the emerging sustainability pathways are based on the coexistence of diverse actors and resources, develop through interconnected temporal phases of practices and are differently sensitised to place depending on the temporal phase. The sustainability pathways reach permanence when the actions of catalysing and revamping take the mode of routinisation. Second, we locate the generative moments of reconfigurations and address the cumulative nature of sustainability. In conclusion, this helps to recognise the incipient forms of sustainability pathways and their potential for local sustainability transitions. publishedVersion