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Paper short abstract

This talk examines a recent energy system and climate forecast produced for the Finnish policy-making community. Further, it examines the politics of the modellers involved in producing the report, which anticipates a policy failure.

Paper long abstract

Energy system and climate models play a central role in evidence-based policy, integrating technical, economic, and operational knowledge to inform political decision-makers. This talk reports a field study with experts involved in Finnish climate and energy policy modelling, focusing on two themes: failure to model, and models projecting policy failure. The experts produced the report "New Measures and Scenarios for National Energy and Climate Policy" (KEITO). In a nationally visible public debate, KEITO demonstrated that Finland's goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035 is expected to fail — attributing this to the current government's insufficient implementation of the climate law and politically sanctioned large-scale forest logging.

We theorise KEITO's models and scenarios as an epistemic object produced by a distinct modelling community with its own epistemic culture: advisory science at state research institutes. We treat this object as an act of world-making. While ostensibly a value-free representation, we are interested in the modellers' preconceptions about the political dimensions and reception of their findings. We ask: to what degree did modellers understand their report as an instrument rather than a representation, and what did it mean to them that the model predicted a policy failure? Earlier studies in energy modelling (e.g. Silvast et al., 2020, 2023; Vergo et al., 2026) show that the central professional rationale of such models is producing legitimacy for evidence-based decisions. We examine what judgments supported the report's scenario-building and how uncertainty was communicated as a softening element within its narrative.