Bhuvana Sekar

How do governments learn? How is trust built between institutions and citizens? These are the questions that drive Bhuvana. She works at the intersection of participatory governance, experimentalist and humble governance, and just transitions – helping governments and institutions build the capacity to sit with complexity, experiment with new approaches, and design more equitable futures. If you’re curious about how design thinking can make policy more human, Bhuvana is your person.

Bhuvana’s path to governance was anything but linear. She started in enterprise UX and service design at Cisco and UiPath, helped build a digital design school and professional design community in South Asia, and eventually followed her curiosity to Finland, earning an MA in Collaborative Design from Aalto University, that was wrapped with a research thesis on creating trustworthy digital public sector services. That journey from product design to public sector transformation gives her a practitioner’s eye for how institutions can be redesigned from the inside, not just legislated from the top.

At Demos Helsinki, Bhuvana has co-designed a multi-month governance experimentation journey for senior Latvian civil servants, done strategy assessments for UNDP HQ, strategy benchmarking for Sitra (Finland’s innovation agency), facilitated just transition roadmap processes with district officials in Jharkhand, India, and developed policy design frameworks for circular economy programmes with UNIDO. She has worked with partners including UNDP, EU institutions, and national governments. 

Bhuvana is on leave from Demos Helsinki until the end of 2026, serving as a Policy Officer at Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (DETE) supporting the Irish EU Council Presidency. If you’d like to reach out to her, feel free to also drop an email at bhuvana.sekar@enterprise.gov.ie. Bhuvana is also reachable (with delay) at bhuvana.sekar@demoshelsinki.fi. 

Outside of work, you’ll find Bhuvana on a yoga mat, in a Zumba class, or curled up with a book and a cup of chai/matcha. Holler ‘sauna’ or ‘a sunset walk’, and she will magically appear too. 

• Bhuvana Sekar’s Google Scholar profile