Research Purpose and Questions

Finland is one of the eight member states of the AC, which is attempting to solve issues, such as BC emissions, that have a negative impact on the Arctic areas and the global environment, as well as pose a health hazard for humans and the ecosystems. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explore Finnish contributions to the decision-making in the AC in terms of sustainable development whist focusing on BC emissions. In particular, the research will investigate why BC emissions are of utmost importance for the Finnish state, gauge what kind of a dangerous BC emission message is spread within the AC and explore the perceptions of the partakers of the AC work: member states, permanent participants and observers, in connection to the Finnish take on BC emissions. When referring to the Finnish BC emission message, the message means a Finnish political, social and moral point of view to BC emissions conveyed by words, signs, symbols and action during the Finnish chairmanship. However, the message is not discussed as a political decision, rather through the perceptions that the partakers of the AC work have gained of the message.

In other words, the research focuses on the perception that the partakers of the AC work have gained of the Finnish BC emission reduction message, based on which suggestions are given for Finland on how to further promote the AC as their desired international regime aimed at reducing BC emissions. International regimes refer to the “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area” (Krasner, 1982, p. 185).

To put it differently, regimes comprise of common rules, set up by the partakers in the international

arena, which define the appropriate social practice (Weisburger, 2010). In fact, the AC has for long been considered as a unique international regime, where governments and indigenous people cooperate to protect the Arctic areas and promote sustainable development through the AC work (Stenlund, 2002). Thereby, this research will shed light on how Finland tries to utilize the existing international regime for enhanced BC emission reduction work through the distributed message and its policy entrepreneurship.

In order to reach the purpose as mentioned above, policy entrepreneurship will be utilized as a theoretical framework for the analysis. Furthermore, as the overall aim of this research is to examine the role of Finland in a multi-stakeholder setting of the AC, as defined by Knecht (2017), for promoting further BC emission reduction work, the main research question is related to examining the policy entrepreneurial characteristics of Finland in the AC in terms of BC emissions.

The sub-questions on the other hand focus more on the BC emission reduction message and how it is perceived. Therefore, the research attempts to answer the following research questions:

Q: What kind of policy entrepreneurial characteristics does Finland obtain to promote black carbon emission reductions in the Arctic Council?

Q1. How do the members, permanent participants and observers of the Arctic Council define the Finnish black carbon emission reduction message?

Q2. How is the Finnish black carbon emission reduction message perceived by the members, permanent participants and observers of the Arctic Council?

To answer the research questions, research philosophy, in the figure 2., was followed. This refers to the way in which the research is conducted based on scientific theories, prior knowledge and the research purpose, thus, guiding the researcher throughout the work and helping to justify the choices, as propounded by Guba and Lincoln (1982). In fact, they have emphasised the importance of choosing the most appropriate philosophical paradigm, because “finding a paradigm that can tolerate real world conditions surely makes more sense than manipulating those conditions to meet the arbitrary design requirements of a paradigm” (Guba & Lincoln, 1982, p. 234).

Figure 2. Research philosophy.

Policy entrepreneurship theory has usually been used as the means to understand policy change processes or policy change resistance of individuals, organizations, institutions and cross-national forums, and thus, in this research it is tested whether the theory can also be applied to a nation.

More precisely, it is tested how the concept of policy entrepreneurial characteristics works when a state is analysed without a specific policy change process under analysis. Therefore, a theory-driven approach is applied for designing questions for the semi-structured theme interviews and for analysing the interview data as well as the information retrieved from the press conferences between President Niinistö and his colleagues in other AC member states through qualitative content analysis. Even though there are two approaches to qualitative content analysis, inductive for situations where there is a lack of information on a certain phenomenon or the existing information is disunited, and deductive for situations where existing theory is tested, or previous knowledge is used as a base for analysis structuring (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008), this research does not clearly fall under either of them. In this regard, a qualitative and theory-driven research design is applied throughout the study for analysing the characteristics that Finland obtains for promoting BC emission reductions in the AC, which is linked to the perceptions that the member states, permanents participants and observers have of the message.

Thereby, the opted research philosophy is a non-positivist approach, where the focus lies on “the perspective and interpretation of the people who are being researched, as well as their interaction for the researched topic” (Avgousti, 2013, p. 38). More precisely, this research falls under interpretivism, which is an ontological option to positivism established based on the non-positivist approach (Aliyu, Bello, Kasim & Martin, 2014). “The spirit of the interpretivist viewpoint is an ontological point of view which looks at reality or truth as a social formation or construct of the mind’s inner feeling” (Aliyu et al., 2014, p. 84). As such interpretivism serves the purpose of analysing the gained perceptions of the Finnish BC emission message and its linkages to the policy entrepreneurial characteristics.