When the green transition knocks on your door

For most people, the green transition arrives as an abstraction. It might be a national target, a column of investment figures, or a debate happening somewhere else. For the people living in the city of Kristiinankaupunki, or in the reindeer herding areas of Northern Finland, it takes a far more concrete shape. It arrives as a plan for a stretch of coastline, or a change to land a family has used for generations. Underneath it runs a deeper question about how much say locals will have in what happens to the place they live in.

That distance matters more than it might seem. Over €300 billion in green investments are in the pipeline in Finland alone. Many of these projects are climate-positive by design. They risk stalling, not because the technology fails or the economics don't add up, but because the communities they land in feel sidelined. Even a project that helps the planet needs local trust to get built.

It is worth being honest about how the phrase itself sounds from the ground. In parts of the north, "green transition" has come close to a swear word. For communities that have watched decisions made elsewhere reshape the land around them, it can read as a licence for more of the same. Recognising that is where the work starts.

Some of the strongest resistance comes from people who are not against the climate goals at all. A wind farm or a power line can serve the climate in the aggregate and still land on a particular forest, fishing water, or reindeer pasture. What looks like opposition to the transition is often a defence of something else worth protecting, and reading it as mere foot-dragging misses what is actually at stake.

Trust is what the whole thing is built on

When a project meets resistance, the instinct is to treat it as something to be managed, whether through better messaging, a public meeting, or a compensation package. Akordi, a Finnish organisation specialising in environmental conflict resolution, works from a different premise. It reads conflict as a signal that something people value is at stake. And the best time to deal with that is long before it hardens.

"Prevention is the best conflict resolution," as Akordi puts it. It is also the cheapest, and by some distance the least painful for everyone involved. Once a dispute freezes, sometimes for years or even decades, the costs pile up in ways that are not only financial. Relationships fray, trust erodes, time disappears. Akordi's work concentrates upstream, at the point where someone first realises a place is going to change and the difficult conversations are still ahead rather than behind. However, Akordi is sometimes called upon to assist when a conflict has already emerged and the parties need help finding an acceptable solution.

What this looks like in practice

None of this is improvised. Akordi’s approach has a name and a track record. It grew out of a field known as public policy mediation and conflict resolution, utilizing methods usch as consensus building, developed over several decades in the United States and taught at institutions like MIT and Harvard. Akordi's founders trained there before adapting the practice to a Finnish context.

What it looks like on the ground is quieter than the word 'mediation' suggests. It usually begins by listening. Akordi maps a situation by interviewing the key parties one by one, asking what they have experienced, what they fear, and what would need to be true for them to come to the table at all. That work can take months. Only then are people brought together, and crucially, before anyone has been asked to defend a finished plan.

Akordi does not drag anyone to the table. Where a conflict has already hardened, the willingness to look for a way out has to come from the parties themselves, and part of the early work is testing whether it is really there.

Kristiinankaupunki is one of the clearest examples of what the approach makes possible. It is a small, bilingual coastal municipality in Finland facing major green transition projects that will reshape its identity and its economy. A place that size can easily feel that big projects are being done to it rather than with it. Akordi’s work there has aimed at something more durable than approval for any single development: helping a small municipality build the capacity to steer large projects on its own terms, with an independent party holding the space so that the smaller voices in the room stay on equal footing with the larger ones.

There is no single template for this. The reindeer herding areas of Northern Finland are a different context entirely, with different history and different stakes. There, wind power developers and herding cooperatives have sat down together, with Akordi as a neutral convenor, to work out shared practices for how projects get planned and run on land that is already in use. What the two cases share is a starting point, treating the groups affected as people who get to decide over what happens to the places they live.

Why this matters to us

The ecological transition will not succeed if it deepens the divides in society. That conviction sits at the centre of how RELEX Foundation thinks about its work, and it is why we support Akordi. We also want the green transition to deserve its name. Akordi speaks of “green on green” conflicts, where a project that serves the climate collides with the nature around it, and a good process is one of the few places where those competing goods, along with the people, livelihoods and cultures affected, can actually be weighed against each other. Protecting the planet at the scale the ecological crisis demands sometimes means building things, often in places where people have good reason to be wary. Having those people on board in making the decisions is the ground the transition stands on.

No one who takes part gives up anything by doing so. Sitting down to talk does not remove the right to challenge a permit or a plan in court later. Collaboration runs alongside the formal processes, not in place of them.

The evidence that it works is already accumulating. Years after Akordi facilitated a shared vision for the future of the Iijoki river system, that collaboration is still generating new projects, and has recently drawn interest from European funders in restoring the peatlands along it. The tensions in these situations are real, and there is no need to overstate them. The more useful story is what becomes possible when the right skills are brought to a difficult conversation, early enough to matter.