Karelian Institute

Some five years ago a small area of Upper Karelia in Finland's eastern periphery rose into national and even international fame by developing a successful computer network service, that mobilised over 25 percent of the local population to enrol as its registered users. The project was ...

There are many institutes with a long history of rural community studies. The story of the relationship of the Karelian Institute and two remote villages in North Karelia is however extraordinary. The multidisciplinary research group consisting of social scientists, cultural researchers, geographers, and many others, has returned to the same villages three times, each time ten years after the previous one. Four reports reflect, not only the changes in the villages and rural Finland in general, but also the changing paradigms of the social and cultural sciences. The reports slowly accumulate also self-reflections about the long research process, as part of the team comes back repeatedly to participate in the new projects. I have personally participated in all the four projects over four different decades. The bases of my paper is my contribution to the latest report (in Finnish "Kylän paikka", the Place of the Village, 2008), where I was discussing the changing understanding of development policies in our reports of various years (1974, 1984, 1996, 2008). Because of our reports these two villages got high media visibility, and I shall discuss how the research has been related to politics, policies, and media discussions at different times.

In 1999 Ashgate Publishers printed a book that was based on Border Research conference 1977 that was organized in Joensuu, Finland and Sortavala, Russia. I wrote a chapter on the changing social images of borderland of Karelia, a region that is defined more by the border dividing it than by borders around it. First draft of the paper was presented in Sortavala in 1977 and since it has been a topic of many lectures and papers in Finnish.

The paper discusses the role of social capital in the dramatic structural change that has taken place in the rural municipality of Sotkamo in north-eastern Finland. The main approach of this study is to observe the formation and use of social capital in important local events. Earlier definitions of local development have been based on factors such as natural resources, labour force, machines and tools, technology, knowledge and skills. The explanation based on social capital focuses on factors which increase and improve co-operation. Important issues of social capital are the existing rules of behaviour, the networks mediating these rules, and the trust amongst members of society that these rules are respected. In the case of Sotkamo the change has been the rise of tourism. Simultaneously this has meant the rise of Vuokatti as the central place in regional and local development. The paper is based on a questionnaire study and key-person interviews in Sotkamo. The paper discusses th...

During the information age and new network economies, new arenas for struggles about exclusion and inclusion are emerging. In earlier times the key factor for being included in the developments of the society was land ownership. In the industrial Welfare State there was political or lobbying power in the negotiations about income agreements, policies and social reforms. In today's Europe the key to being involved in development is the connection to the networks of consumption, production and learning. Also innovations and their diffusion are taking place through networks. If you are not connected in the networks, you are in danger of being excluded, even if you live in a major metropolitan area. The key question of local development, especially in peripheral region, is how to mobilise the limited local resources in such a way that they connect the locality to a growing wave of general development. This chapter discusses lessons from two research projects that have tried to capture how local development has been found to succeed in remote rural areas. Firstly, I shall discuss information society development experiments in Finland, and secondly a comparative transnational study of local development networks in European peripheries. The area of the Upper Karelia was a stage of a community network pilot, which became a model for many other local information society development projects in Finland. The area consist of the northernmost corner of the region of North Karelia, which in turn is an eastern border region in periphery of Finland. Learning Upper Karelia project districted consisted of three municipalities (Nurmes, Valtimo, and Juuka) with a total population of about 20,000 people. It has suffered from unemployment, declining incomes in agriculture and forestry, out-migration of young people, as well as cuts in public services and infrastructure. The Learning Upper Karelia project was based on high awareness of its specific context: distant location, geographically large area with several centres and scattered small settlements, and good communication infrastructure (high speed lines to the local polytechnic). During the two years of operation the number of users of the local community network reached 5000. The project received a lot of favourable publicity in the local and national press and in television. The original project officially concluded at the end of March 2000, but the community network continued to operate as a part of new projects. In the project of Oppiva Vaara-Karjala (Learning Karelia Hills, 2000 the network was extended to three neighbouring municipalities. For exporting its expertise to other local community networks, two enterprises, Karelian Netfellows Ltd and Glocal Ltd were founded. During the extension of the Upper Karelia network to neighbouring municipalities, the

distinguishes five types of regionalism: "old", "new", "postmodern", "transnational" and "international" (Schmitt-Egner 2002: 188). The old and the new types of Schmitt-Egner's regionalisms are similar to traditional regionalism. Old regionalism can be described principally in terms of ethnonationalistic movements. New regionalism is about minimizing the centralization of state power and performing regional modernization to offset the legacies of "internal colonialism". Postmodern regionalism is aimed at strengthening regional competitiveness, and, as opposed to the old and new types, is not based on a "social movement but on a strategy of development". A concrete model of Working Papers WP 2010-06 Centre for German and European Studies

The main idea of the presentation is to present common historical and cultural heritage as the basis for further co-operation development in an institutionalized entity (Euregio Karelia) as one of the perspective types of sub-national integration. The fi rst task is to describe historical (and cultural) background of the institutionalization of Karelian-Finnish cross-border co-operation in the form of Euregio Karelia (e.g. common history (including the Soviet era co-operation), cultural background (e.g. Kalevala), interface minorities with their common traditions, language, religion etc.). Then I turn to the political forecast of the institutional development of Euregio Karelia on the basis of the main integration theories' (transactionalism, functionalism and neofunctionalism) adaptation to the sub-national level. The core (hypo)thesis is that Euregio Karelia was created as a "security community" (Deutsch), but should turn to the functional (Mitrany/Haas) model of trans-frontier regional integration (as it occurred in many cases in Western and Eastern Europe) by means of the potentials of the above-mentioned common historical and cultural background.

В статье рассматривается категория «региональная
парадипломатия». Основная задача статьи ― показать, что
ресурсы внешней среды могут и должны использоваться
региональными властями и другими акторами в целях
социально-экономического и культурного развития. Для
этого проводится анализ форм и инструментов
региональной парадипломатии: интернационализации,
транснационализации и трансграничного сотрудничества в
теоретической и практической перспективе. Каждая из
форм региональной парадипломатии иллюстрируется на
примере Республики Карелия. На основе изучения
практики региональной парадипломатии применительно к
Республике Карелия автор приходит к выводу о том, что не
все формы «общения» с внешней средой используются
региональными акторами одинаково эффективно. Для
превращения республики в «обучающийся регион»,
соответствующий требованиям, предъявляемым к любым
типам сообществ современной глобальной политикой и
глобальной экономикой, необходимо больше внимания
уделять взаимодействию с международными
правительственными и неправительственными
организациями, иностранными государствами, а также
субгосударственными акторами в Европе.