ABSTRACT
The central finding is that while inclusive corporatist negotiations may be far-sighted from the point of view of national economic and industrial performance, they have the systemic characteristic of excluding issues of long-term ecological sustainability: corporatist institutions nurture environmental policy makers' short-sighted mental models, which in turn are the rationale for the short-sighted corporatist institutions. Interviews indicate that despite the high awareness among Finnish policy makers of the need to take into account the long-term future, the institutional framework of corporatism is a disincentive for them to work out and implement environmentally sustainable policies. Finnish corporatism prevents ecological sustainability from even being seriously considered in corporatist negotiations, because decision makers themselves conceptualize environmental issues in unproblematic terms. The main long-term environmental policy problem in Finland is therefore not environmental conflict, but its absence. To improve the situation, corporatist institutions should be dismantled to allow the policy makers' latent ecological awareness to shape long-term policies.
