Latest content
Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
In Imagining Change Through Science – Demos Helsinki Research Encounters, we explored how science and research have shaped societal change.
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Demos Helsinki is currently involved in 14 Horizon Europe projects. From exploring the societal impacts of new technologies to tackling climate challenges, these projects reflect a growing demand for research that sparks systemic change. Discover how we are working across disciplines to shape fairer, more sustainable futures.
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These three research projects are: 1) Reducing polarisation via material participation (MaDem); 2) Coastal waters under pressure – safeguarding a healthy Gulf of Finland in a changing geopolitical and environmental landscape (CoWup); and 3) Safe Water for All (WaterFall).
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In this short Annual Report for 2020, we share reflections on how our operations and community embraced the unique year, highlight key projects and publications and where we go from here, and articulate our role and responsibility in 2021 and beyond.
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21st-century governments face many complex difficult and long-term challenges: from handling demographic transitions to climate change, navigating the fourth industrial revolution to managing pensions. Public finance in the 21st century must be anticipatory—what we refer to as Anticipatory Public Budgeting—to accelerate thinking and action, on how public finance can be better adapted to long-term strategy.
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The vocabulary related to equality is partly overlapping and in public debate different terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The publication, created in a project with the Culture and Leisure division of the City of Helsinki, has made a distinction between “accessibility”, “inclusion”, and “participation” in terms of digital equality.
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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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