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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
We are pleased to announce that the UNDP’s Istanbul Innovation Days (IID), taking place in March 2025, will focus on shaping the next generation of public institutions for a secure and prosperous world.
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Having integrated the internship programme into the community fabric 15 years ago, we at Demos Helsinki have attempted to refine it iteratively. Our goal is to create a welcoming and inspiring work environment for students at the early stage of their careers and impact-making journeys. We reached out to some interns to share their experiences, and below are their reflections.
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What skills are essential for a transition to a net-zero world? How can governments and businesses go beyond anticipating a green transition and actually building one? What are truly “transformational green skills”? Demos Helsinki will host a discussion at COP28 to explore these questions, inviting a cross-sectoral panel of…
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Drawing on almost five years of Cities Mission implementation, Demos Helsinki and its partners from Dark Matter Labs and the Mission Board argue that mission governance has reached policy readiness. Its mechanisms have been tested, its governance infrastructure is in place, and it offers a transferable model for delivering on EU strategic priorities at scale.
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Finland managed the Covid-19 pandemic comparatively well. Yet the longer the crisis lasted, the more visible the limits of the governance system became. This brief examines what a prolonged crisis revealed about institutional strength, societal vulnerabilities, and the kind of governance future crises demand.
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Decades of low growth in Finland may be a symptom of a weakened capacity for renewal inside organisations, including the country’s top businesses. In this report, we explore the role that Finnish companies play in the current growth environment and document what business leaders think should be done next. We conclude with key recommendations for boards and executive teams to create the conditions for a renewed purpose in business, one that fits the current Finnish context and reveals underused capacity for renewal.
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Governing with cities: Europe’s overlooked governance infrastructure
July 21, 2026
The Cities Mission functioned as a natural experiment that revealed an overlooked property of European governance: cities do not merely implement policy more effectively; they generate governing capacity and governance knowledge that Europe should intentionally incorporate into policy design through a revised multilevel governance architecture.
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The next MFF should institutionalise what mission governance has proven
July 21, 2026
The challenge for the next MFF is not to invent a new governance model, but to organise European decision-making around the governing capacity that already exists.
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Governments can steer with wellbeing at the core (but nobody said it was easy)
April 28, 2026
Governments keep promising change and then hitting the same walls with the old machinery. Reorienting governance around human wellbeing is both urgent and possible, and the work continues even when the political climate turns.
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