Tapio Reinekoski

n my PhD research (completed in 2025), I analysed how cities know how to govern climate change. I looked for sociologically informed ways to understand how the governance of a complex and irresoluble problems such as climate change and the critically uncertain futures it brings takes shape in the practices of trying to know what the problem to be acted upon actually is. With the Research Council of Finland -funded projects WISE and LONGRISK, I have designed and carried out policymaking exercises for city politicians and experts to rehearse considering the long-term repercussions of climate heating and to match them with equally long-term policies and with foresight for their uncertain consequences. My analytical outlooks and approaches are informed by science and technology studies, social and political theories of temporality, social practice theories, scholarship on preparedness, futuring and ‘wicked problems’, as well as sociologies of risk and modernity.

Most recently, my work involved the connections between insurance and voluntary carbon offsetting technologies and markets. I am interested in how insurers craft risks and assets from offsetting technologies and how the promissory veracity and temporality of offsets come to stand in for climate action. Insurance and offsetting make up new kinds of relations to the climate, forms of social solidarity, and ecological ontologies as they turn CO2 into financial assets. Insurance and offsetting carry meaningful and powerful consequences to how we conceive of a future of climate crisis, our abilities to retain control of the trajectory towards it, and of ‘nature’ as a financialised resource.

Parviainen, T., Reinekoski, T., Salomaa, A., Laine, E., Janasik, N., Kaaronen, R., Eronen, J. T. & Hukkinen, J. I. (2026). Strategic situational awareness for crisis management. Safety Science 203: 107329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2026.107329

Reinekoski, T. (2026). Governing as if the future obliged the present: A scenario exercise in prefigurative climate policy. Political Studies 74(1): 71–91.   
https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217241311352

Reinekoski, T. (2025). The end of change as we know it: How cities figure what the problem is with climate governance. Tampere University, 1299.     
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-4076-6

Lehtimäki, T., Karhunmaa, K., Reinekoski, T., Manninen, A. & Virtanen, M. J. (2025). Climate moralities offset: A case of formative voluntary carbon markets. The British Journal of Sociology 76(5): 953–964. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70000

Lehikoinen, A., Reinekoski, T., Janasik, N., Ahvenainen, M. & Hukkinen J. I. (2025). Participatory Bayesian Networks for uncovering reflexive unknowns in strategic environmental risk management. Journal of Environmental Management 384: 125373. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2025.125373

Salomaa, A., Reinekoski, T., Salminen H., Krivochenitser, K., Hukkinen, J. I. & Lehtonen, T.-K. (2025). Disjointed modes of building resilience to socio-environmental crises. Ecology and Society 30(6), 6.
https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15766-300106

Reinekoski, T., Lahikainen, L., Virtanen, M. J., Sorsa, T. & Lehtonen, T.-K. (2023). Frictional rhythms of climate work in city governance. The Sociological Review 71(3), 660–678.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221123186

Virtanen, M. J., Reinekoski, T., Lahikainen, L. & Lehtonen, T.-K. (2022). Travels and trials of climate knowledge in Finnish municipalities. Science & Technology Studies 35(1), 2–20. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.97519
https://sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view/97519

Ahvenainen, M., Janasik, N., Reinekoski, T., & Lehikoinen, A. (2021). Tulevaisuusresilienssi ja strateginen ennakointi: kriisinkestävyyden harjoittelua bayeslaisella kausaalimallinnuksella [Futures resilience and strategic anticipation: rehearsing crisis endurance with Bayesian causal modelling]. Futura 4/2021. Available at: https://researchportal.tuni.fi/fi/publications/tulevaisuusresilienssi-ja-strateginen-ennakointi-kriisinkest%C3%A4vyyd