From April 10 to 12, 2024, Jana Holz will be attending the International Forest Policy Meeting 5 (IFPM5) at the University of Helsinki.

She will be involved in two formats. Together with Tuulikki Halla (University of Eastern Finland), she will moderate an interactive session “Coffee Salon Human-Forest-Relationships (HFR) – Potentials and Challenges for Future-oriented Forest Policy and Research” on Wednesday, April 10. The salon will take place as part of the online event series “Scientific Coffee Sessions Human-Forest Relationships”, which flumen has been organizing in cooperation with the Human-Forest Relationship Research Club since 2021. In addition to the participants of the conference, the salon is also aimed at interested people from the University of Helsinki as an interactive format.

In the session “Epistemic patterns and concepts: Facilitating critical analysis on gender in forestry” on April 11, Jana Holz will present together with Dr. Anna Saave (BioMaterialities, Humboldt University Berlin ) and Ronja Schröder (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg) on the topic “Taking care of the forest as a part of nature – conceptual thoughts and empirical insights”. She will discuss her empirical research on industrial forestry bioeconomy in Finland in comparison to forestry practice in Canada and Germany from the perspective of feminist care theories.

International Forest Policy Meeting
The IFPM5 brings together social science researchers from the fields of forest policy, forest science, bioeconomy and socio-ecological transformation processes under the motto “A political forest”. The conference takes place alternately in different European countries and has an international focus.

Abstract

The environmental crisis, increased inequality and an aging population are likely to increase the demand for welfare services in the OECD countries. Economic growth has long been seen as a solution to these problems. However, this is no longer the case. Very few countries have managed to decouple economic performance from ecological footprints and greenhouse gas emissions. Even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission-decline are too slow to match the Paris climate targets. Consequently, interdisciplinary research is key to probe how welfare systems may cope with these challenges, and how welfare provision and economic growth may be decoupled. By drawing on the basic human needs approach and a unique set of data, we explore the social and ecological performances of OECD countries relative to their economic performances. While high-income countries display diminishing welfare returns as economic performance is not improving the satisfaction of health-related needs, the lower-income countries might yield significant surplus if moving to the level of moderate-income countries. However, the satisfaction of autonomy-related needs is so far strongly coupled to economic performance and thus much harder to achieve in an ecologically sustainable way.

Paulsson, Alexander / Koch, Max / Fritz, Martin (2024): Diminishing returns of growth? Economic performance, needs satisfaction and ecological impacts of OECD welfare states. In: Critical Social Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183231218971