Advanced industrial countries

This study addresses Europeanisation and ecological modernisation, using the case study of Finnish agriculture. It analyses the assumption that there has been a general transition towards the policies of ecological modernisation by examining changes in institutional arrangements, discourses and policy practices in the last three decades. The findings on Finnish agri‐environmental policy are somewhat contradictory. On one hand, especially in the policy discourses, there are signs of transition consistent with the ecological modernisation theory. On the other, from the institutional and practice‐oriented perspective, the evidence suggests only some minor changes, even stability in agri‐environmental regulation. We find that the Finnish response to EU regulation has been problematic from the viewpoint of agri‐environmental policy: the transition period of Finnish agriculture due to the entrance into the European market has retarded, at least temporarily, the policy process of ecological modernisation which began to emerge in the late 1980s.