Mankala Chronicles: Nuclear Energy Financing and Cooperative Corporate Form in Finland

Abstract

Drawing on 32 months of interview-based ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines Finland’s “mankala” nuclear energy companies through the lens of anthropological theories of corporate form. Mankalas are limited liability companies run like zero-profit cooperatives that bring together consortia of Finnish corporations and municipal energy providers to purchase, finance, and share the output of jointly owned energy-generation facilities. They have long been associated with “uniquely Finnish” modes of trust, cooperation, societal cohesion, and transparency. In recent years, however, political-economic uncertainties have destabilized Finland’s mankala circuit, impacting how, whether, and when mankalas Teollisuuden Voima Oyj and Fennovoima have pursued new reactor projects. This has impacted reactor technology suppliers abroad, including France’s Areva, Germany’s E.On, and Russia’s Rosatom. With that in view, this paper explores whether anthropological analysis of Finland’s mankala corporate form can inspire new strategies for institutional innovation and reactor project financing for nuclear energy organizations. To chart out avenues for collaboration between anthropologists and nuclear energy practitioners, it concludes by proposing three pathways through which anthropological sensibilities could inform institutional decision making. I term these pathways holism, tracking and translation.

Keywords:

• Nuclear energy financing
• corporate form
• institutional innovation
• organizational anthropology
• Finland

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the U.S. National Science Foundation (number 2011129751), a Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship from George Washington University, and doctoral research funding from Cornell’s Anthropology Department. I thank Marissa Bell, Davydd Greenwood, Lara Houston, Markku Lehtonen, Tapio Litmanen, Mike Lynch, Hiro Miyazaki, Johan Munck af Rosenschöld, Beth Reddy, Josh Reno, Annelise Riles, Antti Silvast, Stephanie Steinhardt, Behnam Taebi, John Wagner, Marina Welker, and Malte Ziewitz for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I thank participants in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Nuclear Energy Agency’s “Nuclear and Social Science Nexus” workshop, held in Paris on December 12–13, 2019, for their feedback. I also thank those who attended The Lorentz Center’s “Multilateral Governance of Technological Risk” workshop, held in Leiden on May 22–24, 2017, for their feedback. I thank Nuclear Technology’s editors and three anonymous reviewers for their generative comments.

Notes

^a I reached out to prospective informants via email. Participation was voluntary. Interviews ranged from 30 minutes to 4 hours. I met with some informants once; others several times. I also took Finnish language courses and wrote notes on friends’ and acquaintances’ experiences of life in Finland. I collected technical documents, policy reports, and other artifacts. Sometimes I engaged with informants’ personal lives. In summer 2013, I spent 2 days at a nuclear waste expert’s family’s kesämökki (a Finnish summer cottage, similar to a Russian dacha), where we barbecued hot dogs, enjoyed the sauna, and visited a nearby limestone mine.

^b Anonymizing informants’ identities is a common practice among anthropologists working with sensitive or personal situations. For examples of papers that similarly highlight the voices of pseudonymized, emblematic, key ethnographic informants see Refs. 27 or 28

^c S-Group paid out bonuses to its client-owners’ S-Pankki accounts whenever they purchased items at S-Group retailers. The money S-Group paid into the client-owners’ S-Pankki bank accounts was not considered a store discount, but rather an owner’s profit.