Publications
Reports, analysis and policy recommendations for brave leaders and communities.
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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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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Given that the global building stock is estimated to double by 2060, the only way to meet the industry’s ecological budget is to turn towards regenerative construction. The publication, a joint effort between Ylva and Demos Helsinki, shares exciting initiatives that are already pursuing regenerative construction.
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Experimentation offers one particularly promising way for navigating the uncertainty and the rapidly changing circumstances. The Guidelines were developed by Demos Helsinki in close collaboration with the Latvian State Chancellery’s Innovation Laboratory and Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) to define different types of experiments and propose the many ways they can enhance policy-making in Latvia.
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