Team

Tuija Seppälä is a senior researcher and social psychologist at the Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), working in the Societal Change unit. Her work focuses on the participation and involvement of individuals, groups and communities in sustainability transformations. Her recent research has examined the agency of marginalized groups and the public acceptance of environmental policies. She also has extensive experience in justice-related research across diverse contexts, including working life and environmental health.

Liisa Varumo is an environmental policy researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute. Her work focuses on questions of social acceptance and environmental justice of market-based conservation, particularly biodiversity offsetting. Her recent studies have looked at how the recognition justice of Indigenous Peoples and local communities is promoted or hindered in offsetting practices related to mining in Northern Finland and Colombia. She has also worked on experimenting and evaluating different approaches to societal engagement on local and European scales for more legitimate EU-level decision-making in biodiversity policy.

Anna Ott works as a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute in the Justice & Agency Group. She is a doctoral candidate in the doctoral programme “Arctic in a Changing World” at the University of Lapland. Her research explores the (ontological) politics of natural resource use, biodiversity conservation, and sustainability transformations in Sápmi. It focuses on how transformations can be just to the Sámi people and how Sámi ways of knowing and being – Sámi worlds – can be recognised and flourish.