Publications
Reports, analysis and policy recommendations for brave leaders and communities.
This white paper delves into the critical need for transformative capabilities in organizations and leadership to navigate the challenges of the green transition. Drawing on over two decades of experience, we distil key insights to illuminate a path toward a sustainable future.
→ Continue reading
Experimentalism is a ‘hidden third option’ that overcomes pre-existing dichotomies and can update the governance of R&I funding while steering it towards societal transformation.
→ Continue reading
The policy brief provides a roadmap for the EU to reform its economic policies and leverage digitalisation for a regenerative digital economy, ensuring the just allocation of digital goods and the equitable distribution of their benefits.
→ Continue reading
What are the most appropriate institutional arrangements for effective governance? How can governance systems effectively operate across different levels, such as local, regional, national, and supranational? How can governments improve their capacity to evaluate policies, learn from successes and failures, and adapt to changing circumstances? By transforming the civil service, we can answer these questions.
→ Continue reading
The government must be able to find novel solutions to the greatest challenges of our time, such as the climate crisis, new security threats, an ageing population, and technological transformations. Directional mission-driven research and innovation policy provides an approach for the government to implement its strategic objectives by solving complex challenges with actors in different sectors.
→ Continue reading
- All
- AI
- Business
- Cities
- Civil service
- Construction
- Democracy
- Economy
- Health & Wellbeing
- Industry & innovation
- Justice
- Public governance
- Skills & work
- Society
- Sustainability & climate action
- Technology
In this discussion paper, written together with Marcos Bonturi, former director of Public Governance at the OECD, Demos Helsinki shares the recent learnings in the field of public governance, identified four characteristics that describe a desirable future government, and presents inspirational governance innovation -cases from Finland, Brazil, Colombia and Serbia.
→ Continue reading
For the government to formulate policies that address the most pressing questions of the 21st century, it must first address the structural and cultural problems of its policy-making processes. The review ’Humble Government’ describes how a humble approach to policy-making can help the Government in building truly long-term policy-making when dealing with wicked problems.
→ Continue reading
The new book “Just Transitions” by the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund aims to serve as a roadmap for the future. It has a chapter written by our Chief Executive Juha Leppänen, in which he makes a case for governance capable of driving transformation.
→ Continue reading
Can a society be steered? Should governments even try to do that? Or should they just preside? In this paper, Demos Helsinki fellow, UCL professor and former Chief Executive of Nesta Geoff Mulgan shows why governments should steer and how they can show the way for our societies to overcome the transformational challenges that they are facing in the current century, from the climate crisis to aging populations.
→ Continue reading
While it is argued that smart city development is at an impasse, we argue that it is at a crossroads. It is possible to simultaneously develop and adopt new technologies and strengthen people’s rights, and this People-first vision presented in this report will show how.
→ Continue reading
At Demos Helsinki, we have been working towards societal transformation for the past 15 years. Now there are 50 of us and we work all over the world. In 2019, we worked in 138 projects in almost 30 countries. Societal transformation is in great demand.
→ Continue reading