Paper info

Networking around a common issue- From words to action in the case of clean Baltic Sea

Asta Salmi and Tiina Ritvala

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

 The most pressing and complex contemporary societal issues can only be solved by networking among different actors and by extensive, often international, cooperation. One of the environmental issues that have been recently acknowledged to call for attention and cooperative efforts is the state of the Baltic Sea. The Baltic, and seas in general, are examples of the borderless world and dependency between countries. The aim of this paper is to investigate the early emergence of (collective) action around a common issue (poor condition of the Baltic sea). We are interested in the role of network mobilizers in promoting the issue and its solutions, as well as the mobilization mechanisms that the key players are using. The analysis concerns how an actively and widely presented interest in the issue by very different types of actors becomes turned into concrete actions. The key contribution of the paper is to offer a rich case study of network development around a common issue to understand better mobilization. Focus on an environmentally related problem means that the implications have wide applications  environmental concerns are bound to increase in importance, not only in the Baltic Sea region, but also globally.