Population Anxieties and Uncertain Futures of Nordic Wellbeing: Exploring the Affective Politics of Demographic Dystopias and Hopes in the Face of Climate Change

• In Event: A Good Life, In Theory: Thinking and Living with Climate Change - II

Abstract

Decreasing fertility rates and trends toward delaying family formation have been noted across the whole of the Western world, generating deep concern from different stakeholders. Finland is no exception to this. In 2020, the total fertility rate was ‘ultra-low’ at 1.35 children per woman – the lowest it has ever been. Population statistics and demographers single out the year 2010, after which the rate has been on decline. Following this turning point, policymaking and public discussion about the future of the welfare society and its conditions of existence has taken many forms, ranging from population-related anxieties over in/voluntary childlessness, care for the elderly and economic vitality to, albeit cautiously, environmental sustainability. Visions of risky futures and good life have hinged on the affectively charged idea of ‘depopulation’, oscillating between demographic dystopias and hopes. Exploring population anxieties in the age of climate change, our paper analyses the enactment of national futures during intertwined demographic and environmental crises. Drawing from policy and media materials, we focus particularly on contested understandings of reproduction, ageing and migration as biopolitical targets. We aim to show that the challenges of imagining demographically and ecologically viable futures are rooted in and arise from the histories of pronatal population policies, difficult legacies of racial hygienics, and the dominant ideas of ethnic and genetic homogeneity, while the role of the natural environment in the biopolitics of populations remains largely unproblematised.

Authors

• Mianna Meskus, Tampere University

• Riikka Homanen, University of Tampere