16th NESS in Turku: Co-producing knowledge for sustainability

Text: Nina Tynkkynen & Marko Joas
Photos: Emma Björkqvist

Sustainability transformations are urging for complementary approaches to understand and affect the ways in which human beings know about and live with nature. In research, this implies sustained attention to interdisciplinary dialogue as a form of knowledge co-production (see Tynkkynen et al. 2023). Such a dialogue can refer both to cooperation across academic fields and disciplinary boundaries, as well as to the engagement with different stakeholders in the processes of knowledge production.

The 16th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference, hosted by Åbo Akademi University in cooperation with the University of Turku in June 2024 gathered over 300 engaged scholars across research fields for meeting and discussing interdisciplinary knowledge co-production and co-creation for sustainability. The conference represents over 30 years of bi-annual gatherings of researchers within the broad field of social science and humanities approaches to environmental studies among the Nordic countries and beyond (for the history of NESS, see Eckerberg 2024). The 16th NESS in Turku attracted also researchers beyond the human sciences to participate and contribute to the work of workshops.

The 16th NESS conference gathered over 300 participants in Turku during three days, 4–6 June 2024.

The format of NESS is that the participants stay in the same thematic workshop for the entire duration of the conference to allow for in-depth discussions. In Turku, there were altogether 25 workshops proposed and chaired by scholars from different Nordic countries (and beyond). The workshop topics looked at co-production and co-creation from different perspectives, ranging from storytelling to co-production of techno-scientific promises and research-based education for sustainability in higher education. The format of NESS requires that the participants invest time into prior reading and discussing each other’s papers, and usually discussions evolve during the workshop so that the workshops also lead to publications in the form of edited books, special issues and co-written articles.

What is peculiar for NESS conferences is that the host university has the freedom to design the overall topic and workshops according to its research profile, or as often also happens, according to topical or timeless research questions. The organizing team chose the topic of interdisciplinary co-production and co-creation, as it is at the core of the research profile The Sea and the Centre of Excellence SOS at Åbo Akademi University. The aim was twofold: first, to highlight our profile as an interdisciplinary community devoted to sustainability research and, second, to arouse interest in collaborative initiatives among different scientific fields and institutions across the Nordic countries. More to the point, the objective was to engage researchers with a background other than social sciences in enjoying the methodological insights and constructive comments that their social science-oriented colleagues can provide. While we do not have statistics of the disciplinary backgrounds of the participants in the 16th NESS, the paper topics indicate that also many non-social science researchers took actively part in the conference in Turku.

Mikaela Vasstrøm gave a keynote titled ”The critical balancing act of co-creation in energy-society transformations” at NESS2024.

Even though workshops are the core of the conference work, we also had the privilege to host five excellent keynote lectures that gathered the participants from the workshops together, around coffee breaks. Keynotes were delivered by Josie Chambers (Utrecht), Jasper Montana (Oxford), Markku Ollikainen (Helsinki), Mikaela Vasstrøm (Agder) and Christina Voigt (Oslo), all with timely and academically interesting topics around the theme of the conference.

As always, it is a great challenge to organize a scientific conference, and this time also an exceptionally large conference within this research area in the Nordic countries. Without the devoted input and hard work from the organizing committee, the management work by Aboa Events, the support from the City of Turku and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and the many voluntary helping hands from students and staff this would not have been reachable. Thank you for your valuable work.

See you at the 17th NESS conference in Uppsala 2026!

Authors

Nina Tynkkynen, Chair of the 16th NESS organizing committee
Marko Joas, Vice-rector for international cooperation at ÅAU

Literature

  • Eckerberg, Katarina (2024), Thirty years of NESS Conferences in perspective: The development of environmental social sciences in the Nordics. In Santaoja, Minna et al. (eds.) Yhteiskuntatieteellinen ympäristötutkimus. Monitieteisen alan muotoutuminen Suomessa 1994-2024. Yhteiskuntatieteellisen Ympäristötutkimuksen Seura ry, Tampere, pp. 216-225.
  • Tynkkynen, Nina; Jetoo, Savitri; Kouri, Jaana; Laine, Silja & Anna Törnroos (2023), Introduction: Towards holistic knowledge of marine environmental changes. In Jetoo et al. (eds.), Understanding Marine Changes: Environmental Knowledge and Methods of Research. Edrawd Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 1-20.