Research Project Corporate Forest II

Regimes of Permission and Posthuman Harm: Corporate Exploitation in Finnish Forests

What is Corporate Forest II

Corporate Forest II in an interdisciplinary research project funded by Research Council of Finland. CF bridges a critical gap in Finnish and international studies on human-forest relations by integrating state-corporate crime scholarship with posthuman legal theory and related approaches to more-than-human world. Employing mixed qualitative-computational methods to analyse legislative and thick case study data, CF empirically explores and theorizes if and how legal and governance frameworks influence the asymmetries between powerful and powerless bodies, exploited and exploitative spaces, and divergent temporalities of law, nature, and corporate practices.

CF aims to undertake a critical, posthuman analysis of Finnish forest governance, moving beyond normative legal prescriptions and law in context framing to challenge the dominant narratives and enable new possibilities. To meet this aim, specific objectives of CF are, to: 

O1: Illuminate corporeal, spatial and temporal harms experienced by human and nonhuman agents in selected MoR (WP2). 
O2: Map and deconstruct legal and policy mechanisms that underpin state corporate symbiosis and privilege extractive bodies, timelines and spaces (WP3). 
O3: Co-create policy, educational and public engagement outputs that disrupt dominant narratives and enable alternative legal futures (WP4). 

The work of CF is conducted in five interconnected Work Packages guided by three interconnected research questions: 

RQ1 (Harms) What corporeal, spatial and temporal harms do human and non‑human agents and spaces experienced in the selected cases? (WP2) 
RQ2 (Law) How do legal and regulatory frameworks shape vulnerabilities, privileging some bodies/spaces/timelines related to forests over others? (WP3) 
RQ3 (Law‑making) Which framings of bodies, times and spaces related to forests feature in dominant policy narratives, and which are neglected during policy and law‑making? (WP4) 

Building on the tradition of state-corporate crime scholarship (Kramer et al., 2002; Michalowski et al., 2006), Building on the tradition of state-corporate crime scholarship examining four emblematic cases – (1) Repovesi, (2) Angeli, (3) Pöllyvaara and (4) Kaupinvaara – of corporate harms to forests and their broader context, spanning three decades of regulatory development (WP2). Importantly, CF situates the four ‘moments of rupture’ (MoR) within broader legal, economic, and political contexts to examine the development of context-dependent ‘regimes of permission’ (RoP), focusing on Finnish and Nordic boreal forest regulation. 

CF broadens the power dynamics central to state-corporate crime scholarship—typically considered through race, gender, space, and class—by drawing on critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2019). WP1-2 examine how MoRs reveal corporeal, spatial, and temporal harms often hidden by dominant state-corporate narratives. WP3 investigates how legal concepts and interpretations prioritize or marginalize different bodies, spaces, and temporalities across both human and more-than-human worlds. 

Traditionally, these complexities have been explored through qualitative methods like multispecies ethnographies (Hamilton & Taylor, 2017). CF expands this by integrating computational policy and lawmaking analysis with thick-case studies. Prior forest governance research has focused on content, thematic, or discourse analysis of policy and legal frameworks—e.g., the constructed nature of ‘nature’ in policy (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005)—while lawmaking processes are less explored. In Finland, tensions in policy and lawmaking have been examines through network analysis (Sara, 2019) and the advocacy coalition framework (Rantala & Primmer, 2003; Pietarinen et al., 2023; Harrinkari, 2024). Building on these methods, CF will use topic modelling and cluster analysis to reveal power dynamics in the reform process and to examine the mutual shaping of policy, lawmaking, and the endangered species, spaces, and timelines (WP4). 

News from the project

Corporate Forest