Publications
Reports, analysis and policy recommendations for brave leaders and communities.
The report provides insights into how the dominant ways of thinking about growth have taken shape and become entrenched: What has changed over the decades? And what might the future look like? Finnish discourse is also placed in the broader context of international societal and scientific debates, as well as global shifts in the operating environment.
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The European Democracy Shield is a timely and commendable initiative aimed at addressing the EU’s growing democratic challenges. However, it would benefit from a more human-centered approach focusing on citizen participation, civil society engagement, and more nuanced policies on digital regulation.
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The answer isn’t less democracy, but more. New participatory and deliberative processes aimed at involving citizens in decision-making are gaining traction across Europe, but their long-term success depends on how well they are embedded into the public administration and society.
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How can countries strengthen their capacity for long-term governance and ensure that future generations are taken into account in decision-making? In this white paper, we highlight ways to promote anticipatory governance based on the views of key Finnish stakeholders. By translating the Finnish experience into a broader context, we aim to provide universally applicable strategies for advancing long-term governance and promoting intergenerational justice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Over the past decades, the term “smart city” has been used as a catch-all for various city development initiatives and concepts. With this joint Nordic Smart City Roadmap, we want to promote conceptual, ethical, and political guidelines that honor a more human-centric, inclusive, and collaborative approach to developing smarter and more sustainable communities.
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This white paper proposes an approach to the policymaking process that aims to renew how governments steer and regulate societies through Collaboration and Iteration. We call this approach Humble Governance.
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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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How can an organization or a society become wiser? This paper by Demos Helsinki Fellow Geoff Mulgan shares some answers with a framework that cuts across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, computer science and organisational design.
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