Grants and residencies

Best from both worlds – enhancing energy transition in Russia and Finland by making resource flows visible

Application summary

The FLOWISION consortium focuses on the visibility of fossil and renewable energy and waste as they traverse through the society in Russia and Finland. By unfolding how these resource flows are made (in)visible in these contexts opens avenues to understand how these commodities are part of the political. That is, visibility and visualization of resource flows, or the lack of it, tells about how these commodities are being (de)politicized, and how they are being imagined as part of climate mitigation policies and practices, and the broader environmental agenda. This knowledge makes it possible both to understand and promote climate-friendly policies and practices. The FLOWISION project aims to learn from both contexts – look for the best narratives and practices – to come up with advice how to speed up the energy transition. We study (de)visualization and (de)politicization of resource flows with an assemblage approach. Hence, we scrutinize how the materialities (e.g. infrastructures) entangled and discourses associated with these resources are utilized to build societally and politically desired assemblages. We head to understand these energy and waste assemblages via three realms: the energy sector, civic activism, and the media. The synthesis of basic research within the FLOWISION project provides us with knowledge facilitating energy transition to a carbon-neutral world beyond the contexts of Russia and Finland. Thus, we engage in action research by proposing new ways to visualize and thus make the flows of fossil and renewable energies, and waste part of political debates, in Russia and Finland, and beyond. This visualization and politicization will be carried out by leaning on co-production between the team's scientists, journalists and artists, and it includes research on the societal impact of our co-production actions.

The FLOWISION (https://flowision.fi) focused on the visibility of energy and waste as they traverse through society in Russia and Finland. By unfolding how these resource flows have been made (in)visible we opened avenues to understand how they are part of the political. We did this via three domains: the energy sector, civil society and media. In Russia, fossil energies are visualized and are part of the regime's identity construction, whereas in Finland, until 2022, fossil energies were detached from the society by not visualizing or politicizing these resource flows.

Pondering the origins of fossil energies consumed in Finland was therefore not widespread before 2022. However, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the following energy crisis made visible and politicized previously invisible energy flows. The war has also accentuated the importance of other resource flows, including waste, in energy-importing contexts, such as Finland.

Therefore, many objectives the project originally had were accomplished in a brutal way because of Russia’s war. The theoretical claims of the project, leaning on spatiality, materiality and visibility of energy, were confirmed on a pan-European scale: flows of fossil energies are depoliticized in resource-poor contexts until they become visible in times of rupture or crisis.

Despite Russia’s war on Ukraine, the team managed to conduct field work, thanks to the fact that we had researchers working physically both in Finland and Russia. The knowledge produced by the project has shown how essential the societal and cultural perceptions on energy and waste are for sustainable policies to evolve. More, the project’s results accentuate that to promote environmentally friendly and socially resilient practices we must have knowledge on the flows of resources from the sites of extraction to the places of consumption. This includes visualization of resource flows by Flowision artist and journalists to foster action.

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