Strengthening climate citizenship in the Finnish cities: local governance and legislation under consideration

Based on previous literature, we presumed that citizen participation is essential for achieving local carbon neutrality targets, and a prerequisite for environmental democracy. We studied how Finnish cities enable citizen participation in climate action and decision-making, how law supports or doesn’t support this, and how environmental citizenship could be strengthened. We asked: 1) How do cities enable the participation of citizens in city-level climate action and policy? 2) How does law support this? 3) What implications do these have for climate citizenship at the city level? We conducted 18 thematic interviews with climate policy experts of Finnish municipalities. We analyzed different modes, objects, and subjects of citizen participation in cities’ climate action and decision-making (and detected different dimensions/types/elements of citizenship cities produce: republican, liberal, post-cosmopolitan, sustainable consumer, communitarian, or relational citizenship). We recognized five ways in which cities enable citizens to participate in climate actions and decision-making regarding climate policy. Firstly, cities engage citizens in climate action by enabling low-emission everyday life, by informing about and by encouraging climate actions. Regarding participation in decision-making, cities engage citizens by informing, consulting, involving/deliberating, and letting citizens decide. The most used means aim to transform the behavior of citizens themselves. Granting citizens direct power in city-level decision-making is less common. To increase understanding on how the existing legal framework defines and enables environmental citizenship, we studied the Aarhus Convention, the Finnish Constitution, the Finnish Climate Act, and the Finnish Local Government Act. The laws set instructions on how municipalities should give citizens opportunities to participate and exert influence. In our interviews, the climate experts did not recognize law as having a strong role in mandating or enabling citizen participation in city-level climate action and decision-making. The everyday significance of participatory rights as defined in legal texts was not present in the data. Regarding environmental citizenship, participation practices in the Finnish municipalities represent primarily liberal and republican environmental citizenship as well as sustainable consumerism. The role of citizens is mainly to vote for their representatives and to make sustainable lifestyle- and consumption choices. Citizens have little real decision-making power regarding climate issues in the examined municipalities. The participation practices that cities employ constitute environmental citizenship that is rather individualistic, submissive to the local government and often focused on consumption and property owning. Legislation gives useful, albeit traditional and rather narrow instructions regarding engagement and the role of citizens. Climate experts were not very familiar with legislation that defined city duties concerning participation. There is a need for wider perspectives on the modes, objects, and subjects of participation both in participatory practices and in legislation to achieve democratic, inclusive, and effective solutions to the climate crisis.