Katse koetteluihin

Maaseudun kumppanuushankkeista kokeilevaan ympäristöpolitiikkaan

Abstract

Local partnerships have long formed the core of European rural policy. Funds have been channelled into
projects that support local actors in innovating novel solutions for rural development. Such rural policy
model has much in common with the recent interest in experimental environmental governance. In both
cases, the partnerships and experiments are intended to provide ‘protected spaces’, which shield and
nurture the local innovations in their development phase. In this article I claim that the experiences gained
from rural partnerships should be examined more carefully when developing experimental environmental
governance. The experiences compel us to address the limits of the protected space in supporting societal
transition. In this article I address these questions with the help of a case study, in which I have followed
how rural development funds slowly started to give form to local water management efforts in the River
Paimionjoki in south-west Finland. In the River Paimionjoki the partnership arrangements, however, got
contested in the meantime. In this article I apply a methodology that offers means for analysing the dynamics
between routinisation and contestation in the practice of partnerships and experimentation. Such a dynamic
assessment is timely, if we are to capture the critical potential of experiments in environmental governance.