Financial literacy is commonly defined as the knowledge, skills, and ability to navigate the increasingly complex financial markets, and is considered to empower consumers to make responsible financial decisions. Financial literacy is increasingly promoted as a crucial life skill in the aftermath of global financial crisis by numerous global initiatives and became part and parcel of national strategies of financial inclusion. By utilizing theoretical insights from Michel Foucault’s late work on governmentality, this dissertation analyzes financial literacy education initiatives in Turkey with ethnographic research. Cultural political economy perspective articulated in this dissertation underlines the importance of theorizing the financialized capital accumulation dynamics together with the reshaping of culture and the constitution of financialized subjectivities. It is argued that financial literacy is a “technique of the self” seeking to govern the everyday conduct of subjects in line with the long-term interests of financial capital. Financial literacy curricula provide not only the basic knowledge of finance but also instruct subjects ways to conduct oneself on financial planning, budgeting, debt management, creditworthiness, saving and investment. Financial literacy agenda deepens neo-liberal governmentality with the promotion of entrepreneurial subjectivity and responsibilization of individuals for social risks such as unemployment, economic downturn, and pensions. By problematizing the constitution of financially literate subjectivity and providing an everyday and cultural perspective on financialization, this dissertation contributes to the discipline of International Political Economy. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Carbon offsetting has been an institutionalised response to climate change for over a decade. Over this period, climate change has become more severe and calls for climate justice have become increasingly insistent. Yet the normative controversies of carbon offsetting remain unresolved, as debates about the environmental quality, development impacts and ethical implications of carbon offsetting continue. This thesis explores the relationship between morality and carbon offsetting in three domains. First it provides an evaluation of the ethics of offsetting. Second it gives an account of the 'lay normativity' of the market, describing how carbon market actors interpret and act upon issues of moral concern. And third, it explains offsetting's moral economy. First, the thesis examines the moral rationales for and problems of offsetting in order to clarify the bases of criticisms levelled at offsets by researchers concerned about trends in neoliberal environmental governance. In evaluation of the ethics of offsetting, the PhD recognises some limited rationales, but mainly highlights widespread problems including lack of environmental integrity and failure to produce 'sustainable development'. The structure of the market is shown to create opportunities for malpractice and difficulties for reform. Second, building on work in cultural political economy, the research describes carbon offsetting's lay normativity. The account is based on interviews with over sixty carbon offset market actors including project developers, consultants, auditors, regulators, retailers and buyers in the UK, continental Europe, and in India. Findings show that the market is founded on ethical principles: offsetting is nothing without notions of environmental and developmental care. Critiques of, and reforms to, offsetting are also grounded in principled debate. But carbon market actors often use their power to further commercial interests that are not aligned with production of environmental or developmental value. And yet, even as rationales are ignored and problems are amplified, market actors maintain a discursive semblance of moral behaviour through forms of justification, story-telling and identity work. Third, the thesis explains how principles, profit and power combine to affect the governance of offsetting. It shows that the concentration of power among profit-seeking actors drives the production of offsetting's moral problems in the stages of project development, regulation and retail. Commercial interests in the politics of knowledge lead to manipulation of the discursive framings through which people come to understand offsets. Ethical narratives are deployed to sustain the market in states of dysfunction, enabling privileged groups to gain exchange value at the expense of climate protection and sustainable development. Through this explanatory work, the PhD contributes an original application of ideas about moral political economy to the case of climate change and carbon trading, demonstrating that powerful actors can shape culture and alter our perceptions of right and wrong.

Att den norrländska landsbygden länge haft befolkningsproblem råder inga tvivel om, och dess befolkning spås inte heller öka i framtiden. Så sent som i somras kom dock en önskan från Näringslivscheferna i Region 8-kommunerna om att man tillsammans ville börja arbeta med inflyttning och rekrytering. Syftet med denna studie var att studera hur kommuner inom Region 8-samarbetet arbetar med att öka kommunens inflyttning och attraktionskraft. Detta undersöktes genom ett fokus på platsmarknadsföring utifrån ett statsvetenskapligt perspektiv. I studien genomfördes kvalitativa intervjuer med utvalda kommuner inom Region 8-samarbetet, och även med en representant för Region 8 som helhet. Studien identifierade att samtliga av de kommuner som ingick i studien, och även Region 8 i stort, använder sig av meningsbyggande åtgärder, definierade genom CPE, i arbetet med inflyttning och attraktionskraft. Det vill säga man lyfter fram det som sedan tidigare är en del av kommunens identitet och bygger mening kring denna, i syfte att locka till sig invånare och besökare.

Abstract A predominant academic question is how and why the development paths of municipalities and regions take certain forms. In recent decades, geographers and economists in particular have investigated the dynamics of how local institutional conditions and their local mobilisation can affect development outcomes and how development is determined by “structural” forces such as state- and EU-based regulations and globalisation of the economy. Thus, the notion that historical sensitiveness and context-dependency are essential factors in local and regional development and growth has gained credence. Then again, municipalities and regions are not “islands” of development but integral parts of complex socio-spatial relations and processes. From this viewpoint, border municipalities and regions are eminently interesting research contexts as they are sites where different scalar political interests, institutional structures, and development discourses are continuously manifested, materialised and contested in the daily practices of local and regional actors. Nevertheless, this thesis argues that the existing mainstream studies investigating the development paths and prospects of border regions and municipalities are, firstly, overly EU-centric and, secondly, have an overly limited perspective on the institutional environment and legacy in which local and regional actors operate. The main attention in this regard has often been on the institutional differences between states and nationalities. In order to understand the development prospects of border areas and the preconditions of transnational regionalisation, municipal planning of border areas needs to be approached not only from the perspective of EU-driven cross-border co-operation and building of “transnational” scale, but more comprehensively. Accordingly, the present research on the Finnish-Swedish border area, which is an internal border area of the EU, takes a more historically and contextually sensitive institutional approach in this regard. Investigating the structural and discursive dynamics related to the institutionalisation of cross-border co-operation as a development strategy in the context of municipal planning enables not only identification of the conflicts and intersections between state-, EU- and local/regional-level development interests and institutional structures, but also provides room for recognising the diversity of the existing interests, strategies and motivations of local and regional actors and different interest groups involved in these institutionalisation processes. This thesis suggests that the concept of policy transfer and problematisation of the dynamics of how and why certain development strategies, policies and discourses become selected, implemented and sustained at the border municipalities offers a fruitful theoretical and political framework for examining the abovementioned issues. Accordingly, the thesis studies the intertwined relationship between local agency and the mobilisation of scalar institutional structures in regional planning and policy transfer processes by applying the Cultural Political Economy approach and strategic-relational theory on institutions (see Jessop & Sum 2013) as theoretical-methodological lenses. The thesis consists of three original research articles that form a scalar and temporal continuum. The empirical research is based on interviews conducted with key municipal and regional actors (i.e. planners, politicians, project managers and entrepreneurs), historical document material reaching back to the 1930s, as well as supplementary policy documents produced at various governmental levels. Both critical discourse analysis and content analysis are used as analysis methods. As the dynamics of municipal planning are reflected primarily against the formal institutional planning system in Finland, the study focuses on the Finnish side of the border — the Finnish Tornio Valley and the Kemi-Tornio sub-region. The results underline that the institutionalisation of cross-border co-operation as a key development strategy has been a long path-dependent process in which policy transfer processes and local mobilisation have become intertwined. While the “large-scale” development follows the Finnish national development — the transition from state-led, topdown politics to a more bottom-up, region-based development model — the investigation of these policy transfer processes also shows that the border location and the mobilisation of both the “border region identity” and the EU’s cross-border co-operation policy discourse have had a marked impact on the development path. Accordingly, they have furthered the development towards cross-border regionalisation. Moreover, border municipalities are challenging the state’s authority and the subordinated municipality-state relation by invoking this development. This development, however, is regionally contested and exemplifies the power relations both between municipalities with/without state border as well as between public and private sector actors. In the end, which development strategies become dominant or discarded in a particular context depends on how different actors and interest groups mobilise their privileged positions in relation to surrounding formal and informal institutional structures, such as municipal autonomy, EU cross-border cooperation funding schemes, trust relations, regional identity, and prevailing norms and customs. This research stands as an illustrative example that it is crucial not to consider these context-specific “soft” matters as somehow secondary to “rational” economic reasoning when investigating courses of action and economic development paths. / Original papers The original publications are not included in the electronic version of the dissertation. Jakola, F. (2016). Borders, planning and policy transfer: historical transformation of development discourses in the Finnish Torne Valley. European Planning Studies, 24(10), 1806–1824. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1194808 http://jultika.oulu.fi/Record/nbnfi-fe2019102434646 Jakola, F. (2018). Local responses to state-led municipal reform in the Finnish-Swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 196(2), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69890 http://jultika.oulu.fi/Record/nbnfi-fe201903088103 Jakola, F., & Prokkola, E.-K. (2017). Trust Building or Vested Interest? Social Capital Processes of Cross-Border Co-Operation in the Border Towns of Tornio and Haparanda. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 109(2), 224–238. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12279 http://jultika.oulu.fi/Record/nbnfi-fe2019102434644

<p>Combining insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and neo-Gramscian IPE theory, this paper puts forth a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective to analyse the discursive articulation of ‘European subjects’ in the context of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda modernisation strategy. It is suggested here that the transformation proposed in Lisbon to the new economic imaginary of the knowledge based economy (KBE), depends on ‘new subjects’ and thus new discursive constructions of identities to reflect the new economic and social formations it envisions. The citizenship discourses of two of the Lisbon Agenda’s main supporters, specifically European business lobbies (represented by the ERT and LCEC) and the EU Commission, are examined in order to explore the relationship between citizenship rights and responsibilities and the two main goals of the Agenda, namely economic competitiveness/growth and social inclusion/social welfare protection modernisation. The argument is made that the discursive articulation of a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ variant of citizenship, especially evident in the discourses of the EU’s business lobbies and the EU Commission since the ‘shift’ to jobs and growth in early 2005, represents an attempt to further the commodification of the EU polity, and as a result, subordinate the more social goals of the Lisbon Agenda to the perceived imperatives of economic growth and competition. The Lisbon Agenda does not therefore mark a dramatic ‘turning point’ in favour of a more ‘social Europe’ as was speculated early on, but instead works to consolidate the dominance of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ as the socio-economic governance model for the EU. The paper ends with a discussion of the possible counter-hegemonic movements challenging the orthodoxy of embedded neoliberalism and neoliberal communitarian conceptions of citizenship.</p>

Since its inception in 1989, the private water sector of England and Wales has been enlisted as a centrepiece in debates concerning the merits of privatisation. Advocates point to increased environmental performance and increased investment. Critics note a significant retraction of the early free market aspirations and increasingly prescriptive regulation. However, market mechanisms and liberalisation are once again being emphasised in policy, reigniting the debate surrounding the commoditisation of water. This thesis engages directly and critically with Karen Bakker's 'Uncooperative Commodity' approach to the 'reregulation' of the industry, arguing its tenants must be adapted to accommodate these recent developments. While Bakker's earlier accounts of the reregulation of the water industry placed a great emphasis on the geography and biophysical properties of water, later work by both her and her contemporaries have developed more refined and socialised models of how water and society interact to produce temporary regularities in the material world. This thesis argues that an appropriate means of developing Bakker's original thesis would be a greater focus on socio-historical context when exploring the materiality of water, and hence the degree to which water may be transformed into a private commodity. Bob Jessop's Strategic Relational Approach (Jessop 2008) is deployed as a means of describing and relating: (1) the degree to which research can identify underlying mechanisms which govern the outcomes of attempts to commoditise water under capitalist modes of production, (2) the role of the state and politics in flanking or supporting the commoditisation of water and (3) the role of existing discursive-institutional structures in introducing path-dependencies and uneven power geometries which in turn effect the outcomes of collective action towards the commoditisation of water. The thesis documents historical developments in English and Welsh resource planning, regulation, and policy from 1945 to 2012 in order to explain the current structure of the industry, its response to water scarcity, and the origins of the current reform programme. It then focuses on the conflicts and tensions between actors in the industry generated by the current reform programme and their role in affecting the degree of success of the programme itself.

Cette thèse suit l’évolution et la transmission du concept de GND à travers le temps et l’espace via l’analyse des documents produits par les groupes GND de Grande Bretagne, d’Irlande et d’Irlande du Nord dans une perspective comparative. La thèse intègre des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives, dont des entretiens semistructurés, l’analyse lexicométrique et une forme adaptée de l’Analyse Critique du Discours afin de répondre à la question suivante : « Comment les discours et les idéologies des 'Green New Deals' de l'Irlande, la Grande-Bretagne et l'Irlande du Nord peuvent-ils être compris en relation les uns aux autres et dans leurs contextes respectifs ? » La thèse explore l'influence des contextes et des groupes sur les discours et le contenu idéologique des textes Green New Deal, et avance l’argument que bien que les Green New Deals aient, à des degrés divers, le potentiel pour constituer la première étape d'une transition sur le long terme vers une économie politique juste et verte, ils se doivent de développer certains thèmes pour permettre à leur potentiel transformateur d’opérer, au lieu de renforcer les idéologies actuellement dominantes. / This thesis follows the evolution and transmission of the Green New Deal concept through time and space by examining the British, Irish and Northern Irish Green New Deal documents from a comparative perspective. It uses quantitative and qualitative methods including Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and the collection of elite oral history interviews to respond to the guiding question, “How can the discourses and embedded ideologies of the Green New Deals of the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and Northern Ireland be understood in relation to one another and their respective contexts?”. The thesis explores the influence of contexts and groups on the discourses and ideological contents of the Green New Deal texts, ultimately finding that though the Green New Deals have the potential to act as transitional documents in a move towards a just green political economy, further work must be done to develop key themes in the texts and ensure they realise their transformative potential rather than simply reinforcing currently dominant ideologies.

Combining insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and neo-Gramscian IPE theory, this paper puts forth a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective to analyse the discursive articulation of ‘European subjects’ in the context of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda modernisation strategy. It is suggested here that the transformation proposed in Lisbon to the new economic imaginary of the knowledge based economy (KBE), depends on ‘new subjects’ and thus new discursive constructions of identities to reflect the new economic and social formations it envisions. The citizenship discourses of two of the Lisbon Agenda’s main supporters, specifically European business lobbies (represented by the ERT and LCEC) and the EU Commission, are examined in order to explore the relationship between citizenship rights and responsibilities and the two main goals of the Agenda, namely economic competitiveness/growth and social inclusion/social welfare protection modernisation. The argument is made that the discursive articulation of a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ variant of citizenship, especially evident in the discourses of the EU’s business lobbies and the EU Commission since the ‘shift’ to jobs and growth in early 2005, represents an attempt to further the commodification of the EU polity, and as a result, subordinate the more social goals of the Lisbon Agenda to the perceived imperatives of economic growth and competition. The Lisbon Agenda does not therefore mark a dramatic ‘turning point’ in favour of a more ‘social Europe’ as was speculated early on, but instead works to consolidate the dominance of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ as the socio-economic governance model for the EU. The paper ends with a discussion of the possible counter-hegemonic movements challenging the orthodoxy of embedded neoliberalism and neoliberal communitarian conceptions of citizenship.