4.3 Partnerships provide leverage

Acting in different roles is also acting in different networks – whether that network is a sports club, a school, a fire brigade, a local or national government body, or even a global climate conference. Even individual actors who have accumulated a particularly high level of power can usually only exercise it through networks. The role-based approach to responsibility also highlights the fact that effective action to promote the sustainability transition usually requires a variety of partnerships, which also cross many boundaries between sectors and groups of actors.

In the public sector, for example, office-holders and decision-makers need maps and descriptions of pathway options and their estimated impacts on the environment and people, produced by the research community, to help them prepare decisions (although it should be borne in mind that sometimes impact assessments produced by scientists are off mark). Generally, fair decision-making also involves consultation with stakeholders who are substantially affected by the decision to be taken. Consultation is a form of partnership, but it is also an important arena of struggle, especially in large, international and national policy arenas. The definition of partnerships also raises many ethical questions about who counts as an essential stakeholder and who does not. Recent debates in organizational studies, for example, have begun to challenge the human-centered definition of a stakeholder and draw attention to non-human nature, which researchers argue should also be approached as an entity of stakeholders (not just as one single “nature in general” stakeholder), the consideration of which places significant normative demands on acceptable forms of partnership building.

As higher-level policies are implemented at local levels, for example, when municipalities respond to climate law requirements for emission reductions, local-level interactions become the relevant partnerships. Communities and organizations working at the local level provide information on, for example, their own concerns and strengths, and on the types of solutions that are likely to be accepted in the community in the first place. Local communities also hold a wealth of local knowledge that is not even practically possible to translate into the map language of science – or it would require so many years of research that the world could not afford it nor would there be enough research resources at all local levels. Thus, local participation contributes to filling the knowledge gaps of officials who seek to promote the sustainability transition.

The role of local communities in considering ways to adapt to climate change, for example, has been strongly highlighted in research in this field for a long time. Since then, the importance of local participation has also been addressed in the context of the acceptability of climate change mitigation measures and renewable energy projects. It is local actors who, in a concrete sense, will in any case carry out the sustainability transition: at best, it can be steered and accelerated from the political level.

Planting mangroves in Indonesia. Restoring mangrove forests restores biodiversity and helps local communities adapt to the impacts of global warming. Mangrove forests prevent erosion and reduce flood and storm damage. Ikhlasul Amal, CC BY-NC 2.0.

Businesses are equally dependent on partnerships for their sustainability efforts. Firstly, companies operating in highly competitive sectors need signals that point in the direction of future change from public authorities to support their sustainability efforts. Signals regarding the future show a company that it can remain competitive in five years' time, too, if it makes significant investments in solar and wind power generation now.

For example, climate policy targets to increase the use of renewable energy and transition plans to phase out fossil energy (or to significantly increase the price of fossil energy) signal to the company the viability of investing in renewables. If, on the other hand, we live in a society in which the next election could turn energy policy equally in favor of coal- and peat-based energy production and giving subsidies to them, it would be an enormous risk for a business to make a major investment in renewable energy.

In addition, large companies in particular are now increasingly looking for science generated by the research community to support their activities, including through direct partnerships with researchers, both through hiring them and through various co-creation projects. Of course, the motivations behind these collaborations vary between companies. Unfortunately, collaborative projects aimed at greenwashing one's own activities – for example, looking for a viewpoint from which the environmental impact of their activities could be described as the most clean or climate-friendly – have also been practiced throughout the ages. Sometimes even scientists with research training get involved in these schemes. On the other hand, it is ultimately the companies themselves that formulate the titles of their various publications, and the use of the word “research”, for example, can be very liberal. The key issue, even for valid information, is how it relates to the big picture: for example, a company may focus its communications on its new, genuinely sustainable innovation and research results confirming its sustainability, but fail to mention that the core business of the company still relies on completely different, unsustainable production processes and raw material flows. What is needed is scientific literacy on the part of the public and decision-makers as to when research that is made public is scientific research and when it is (consciously or unconsciously) just a calculation made to polish the image of a particular actor.

The research community has also been increasingly encouraged to form partnerships. The ability of research to have an impact outside the scientific world is called societal impact which, in the context of the sustainability transition, has become a buzzword for research projects. In Finland, for example, the Strategic Research Council, which distributes a substantial amount of government research funding, only funds projects with a strong plan for societal impact and partnership building. Partnerships can be built with public sector actors – such as ministries, municipalities and schools – as well as with various businesses and third sector organizations. As the requirement for partnerships as a condition for research funding becomes more common, researchers face new challenges. Interacting with partners and safeguarding the scientific quality, autonomy and internal integrity of research requires new skills from researchers. The research results are not always to the satisfaction of the partners involved, but it is also important for the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge to make these results available to the public and decision-makers.

The implementation and widespread deployment of many technological solutions also requires partnerships between all three sectors (public, private and civil). For example, technology per se would enable solutions such as personal emissions trading. In a personal emissions trading scheme, each individual would have their own carbon budget, within which they must stay, or they would have to buy emission allowances from the market from someone who lives more climate-consciously. However, to be effective, such solutions would need to be both based on sufficiently up-to-date scientific knowledge and extend to all key areas of consumption that have an impact on climate, including consumption choices within the food, energy and transport systems. This in turn would require a very high degree of cooperation between the public and private sectors and a willingness to share data. The debate on personal emissions trading has been going on for more than 15 years, and in 2008 the UK government, for example, said it was, as a solution, too far ahead of its time. However, recent scientific debate has suggested that the time is ripe for experimenting with personalized emissions trading, especially in countries that make extensive use of artificial intelligence. Recently, personalized emissions trading has been tested in a limited form in the city of Lahti, for example.

Partnerships thus provide leverage to promote sustainability transition through different roles; they are a kind of a "muscle" that can be used to promote the possibilities granted by a given role much more effectively. However, as the reflection on partnerships in the scientific community showed, partnerships are not always an asset in themselves; they also bring new demands to many jobs and, in some cases, create tensions between doing the job well and maintaining partnerships.

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