‘Reaching Maturity’ or ‘Selling Out’? : The Idea of Green Growth in Finnish Green Party Environmental Discourses 1988–1995

Abstract

Over the past decades, major shifts have taken place in public environmental discourses transnationally, of which the Finnish Green party provides an illustrative example. Green parties were formed throughout Europe to represent radical alternative social movements and their growth-critical ideals. By the turn of the millennium, however, earlier radicalism was transformed into moderate ideals of green growth. This chapter demonstrates how green growth ideals were used as a political tool by the Finnish Green Party to better adapt to a free market political system, as well as some of the premises with which this turn was implemented. As a political act, the goal of implementing green growth ideals was to be more efficient within the prevailing political system. The need for such pragmatism can be explained with William Connolly’s framework of cultural belonging: in order to act meaningfully, one needs to adapt to the premises of the culture one operates in, causing a challenge for paradigm-shifting environmentalism to become implemented politically. The case of Finnish Green party ideological development provides an example of this transnational phenomenon.