Inna M. Perheentupa

Investigating how consultants pursue just and sustainable change in Finland, Sweden and Belgium

Speaker is doctoral student Inna M. Perheentupa from the University of Helsinki.

About

Inna Perheentupa works as an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Department of Sociology. She specialises in political sociology issues, such as activism and social change, equality, democracy and sustainability, political imagination, feminist research, and ethnographic and creative methodologies. She is the author of Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia. An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources (Bristol University Press 2022) and one of the authors of Feminismiä talouteen! Opas kriittiseen lukutaitoon (Towards a Feminist Economy. A Guide to Critical Economic Literacy, Gaudeamus 2024).

Her current research project maps the growing field of sustainability consultation and the porous threshold between sustainability consultation, activism, and politics in three EU countries: Finland, Sweden, and Belgium. While the market for sustainability experts expanded rapidly due to the EU Green Deal and related corporate sustainability directives, it finds itself in 2026 in a novel and uncertain situation following the dismantling of these rulings by the new EU commission. In this project, Perheentupa combines her two occupational backgrounds: her earlier background in consultation and communications with her more recent scholarly endeavor.

Hosts

This seminar is part of the GP seminar series.

 

Abstract

In this presentation, I discuss my research project, which maps the politics of sustainability consultation in three EU countries: Finland, Sweden, and Belgium. While the fieldwork in Sweden and Belgium is only about to begin, I will present early findings from Finland.
The ecological crisis and recent EU legislation, among other things, have widened demand for consultants advising companies and other organizations on sustainability issues. The SUSCON project uncovers the expanding and diverse field of ecological and social sustainability consultants in three EU countries: Finland, Sweden and Belgium. Although consultants and the rise of ‘consultocracies’ generally have been studied quite extensively, we still know relatively little about sustainability consultants specifically, despite their key roles in attempts to transition to more sustainable societies.
In this project we are interested in how sustainability consultants make sense of their work, how sustainable social change is pursued from this position, and how it brings together ecological and social sustainability. We thus map ways in which sustainability consultants position themselves in relation to sustainable social change and advance this in, among other things, the market context. The research material produced in different EU countries enables comparisons of forms of sustainability consultation in different contexts and in relation to EU politics.

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