The Action4Commons research consortium has two work packages. WP1 at Tampere University, led by Johanna Kujala and WP2 at LUT university, led by Laura Albareda. The teams meet at least four times a year, twice online and twice face to face.
The spring meeting was organized by WP1 and it took place May 15, 2023 in Varala, which is a beautiful venue by the Pyhäjärvi lake in Tampere. It was a delight to catch up with all project members and meet some new faces as well. We had lunch and dinner together as well as the option to go to sauna and palju or take a swim in the cold lake (which some of us did!). The informal engagement that is part of our meetings supports fluent online communication between the teams.
The teams caught up with each other’s progress. WP1 has been collecting data for the analysis of sustainability and annual reports of mining companies that operate in Finland. The team has also started case studies on two Finnish mines and conducted several interviews with the selected mining companies and their stakeholders. Johanna Kujala and Annika Blomberg had even the chance to participate in a stakeholder event in Kemi and build trust with the employees and various stakeholders of the mine, which will support conducting future interviews. The team has also started a literature review to study the connection between stakeholder theory and commons literature. The progress of the literature review will be presented in the International Association of Business and Society (IABS) Annual Conference in Bath, UK in June.
WP2 has progressed in several ways, too. The LUT team has begun to work on a conceptual review on polycentric governance frameworks and the role of commons in a management setting. The literature review is ongoing, with materials being collected and the processing and reading of the collected papers well under way. In addition, the primary data necessary for the policy sector analysis topic model has been fully collected (n > 500 documents) while the secondary bibliometric data is yet to be added based on further considerations. Preprocessing frameworks for the materials have seen early preparatory work which will require further finetuning. The primary modelling framework has been prepared conditional on finetuned preprocessing, while the analytical details and scope of application are yet to be determined.
The teams also discussed sharing their findings with each other along the way of the project. Currently, the teams are mainly working on separate tasks but both teams are prepared for strong collaboration, which benefits the final outcomes of the project as designed in the research plan. The next meeting will be online and organized by LUT. Meanwhile, we may very well meet each other in conferences and seminars during the summer and further discuss our research.
