MAKUTANO - means "gathering" in Swahili. The MAKUTANO research project aims to develop appropriate and new methodological and theoretical approaches for environmental collaboration and conflict resolution to be used in Tanzania and elsewhere. The action research approach will be used to find out if urban forest owners influence forest governance, and induce local conflicts over resource utilization. The project provides skills on environmental collaboration and conflict resolution to a group of small- and medium-scale forest owners and local community members in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, and traces how these skills are transformed and used in the future actions of these forest owners and the surrounding communities. The project is funded by the Develop Academy Programme (2019-2022), which is a programme jointly prepared by the Academy of Finland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. In many developing countries, there has been a transfer of public and open access land to private use. In the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, the promotion of small-scale private plantation forestry has attracted domestic investors to capture this new resource frontier to meet the increasing demand for timber. This has further increased land value and consequently also land related disputes. The main objective of MAKUTANO research project is to study skills on environmental collaboration and conflict resolution methods among a group of forest owners and local community members in Southern Highlands, and to trace how these skills are transformed and used in the future actions of these forest owners and the surrounding communities. The research idea has emerged from Tanzanian small scale forest owners. The project outcomes may influence Tanzanian-Finnish collaboration by promoting social safeguards to mitigate unexpected impacts of plantation forestry. The research collaboration involves international partners from Tanzania, Kenya, Mexico and Denmark.

The main aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to enhance the understanding on the long-term impacts and effectiveness of Educational Programmes implemented in Natural Protected Areas as a biodiversity conservation strategy - including impacts on Local Environmental Knowledge. To do so, particular Educational Programmes implemented in Protected Areas in Finland and Madagascar have been selected as case studies context, providing a socio-ecological system approach, including human-wildlife conflicts, and also local community participation and LEK integration possibilities.

Many have argued that the shared history of the Mediterranean ended as the Great Powers withdrew from the area after the First and the Second World Wars. As the European colonial powers were expelled from eastern and southern coasts they reorganized themselves in the European Community and carried on with new northwesterly and transatlantic trajectories. Yet, the influence of the two Superpowers, the US and the USSR stepped into the Mediterranean as powerful opposing forces in the bipolar Cold War.

The aim of my research is to understand what is it exactly that defines how corporate legitimacy is created. The research engages in the following research questions: What is the role of stakeholder dialogue in the creation of corporate legitimacy? How is legitimacy upheld in the public sphere through media representations? And how can companies and locals, learn to work side-by-side before costly and damaging conflicts emerge? Legitimacy is looked at from three different perspectives: first, the organizational legitimacy or "the generalized perception or assumption that the actions are desirable within a socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions" (Suchman 1995:574); second, the democratic legitimacy ("consent of the governed") in terms of stakeholders giving their consent to the corporations to be present in their communities; and third, legitimacy as the outcome of a place-bound social imaginary (Taylor, 2002) and the capacity of an organization to sustain and maintain the reproduction of life (Dussel, 2013) within that particular imaginary and place.

The “Employee Participation and Collective Bargaining in the Era of Globalization – Nordic and Chinese Perspectives” research project examines workplace governance through collective bargaining and employee participation from a comparative perspective. The project explores the legal framework and experience in collective bargaining and employee participation in Finland and the other Nordic countries and China and asses the roles of these mechanisms in adaptation to changes caused by globalization. The project is a joint effort between the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Institute of Law and the University of Helsinki Faculty of Law.

The objectives of the project are to analyze the emergence of bioenergy governance systems and regulation from a transnational scale to local environments. This research project aims to study means how the conflicts are dealt with and develop tools to include stakeholders to governance processes. The study aims to: 1) Study how conflicts and stakeholder involvement are taken into account in the emerging transnational BEG by focusing on two cases: Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP) and EU bioenergy policy. 2) Scrutinize concrete local bioenergy projects through case studies in Europe and Africa (Kenya, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone). 3) Examine bioenergy conflicts globally by constructing a broad database, as well as develop related educational resources.

This research project analyses the influence of social movements on primary sector extractive investments. The theory how social movements influence the politics of corporate resource exploitation will be developed and tested through a comparison of empirical evidence from 30 resource exploitation projects in the forest and metal industries of Brazil and India. The research will identify the generalizable and specific mechanisms and political games by which movements transform the local-global political dynamics in areas where increasing transnationalization of resource flows has taken place. Causal process analysis combined with various methods and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 30 cases provides a strategy for working through empirical materials collected by field research. The project belongs to the fields of social scientific environmental research and Political Science/World Politics.