Taking the car out of the countryside: Understanding opposition to climate policy in rural Finland

Abstract

There is an urgent need to decarbonize mobility. Yet, the necessary policies risk compounding existing vulnerabilities and controversies and creating new ones, potentially leading to political polarization. One affected population consists of people living in rural peripheries. Drawing from a Finnish public consultation survey (n = 18,378), we explore how rural participants (n = 4995) experience policies and proposals to decarbonize mobility: how they perceive the problem and what they propose as solutions. We draw on Noortje Marres' concept of attachments to understand the socio-material, discursive and subjective attachments that coalesce in rural experiences of policies and proposals to decarbonize mobility. We contribute to previous research on spatial inequalities in the mobility transition by showing how electric vehicles might not simply replace internal combustion engines in rural areas. We also show how distributive policies, i.e. subsidies, might not solve the problems, because different dimensions of attachments are intertwined and serve to maintain each other and thus reinforce existing experiences of inaccessibility and injustice. We conclude with suggestions for how to better address just and acceptable mobility transitions for rural dwellers.