Towards ecowelfare state: orchestrating for systemic impacts.
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The document describes a research project called "Towards Eco-Welfare State: Orchestrating for Systemic Impacts" which is studying and developing governance practices to enable a fair transition to a Finnish eco-welfare state by 2025 through impact-driven and participatory governance approaches. The project is funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland and involves collaboration between universities and research institutions to address challenges of integrating environmental and social policy goals through themes like dynamic public administration and influencing consumption choices.
Towards ecowelfare state: orchestrating for systemic impacts.
- 1. Tuuli Hirvilammi Senior Research Fellow, Tampere University Towards EcoWelfare State: Orchestrating for Systemic Impacts Welfare recalibration and the ecological crisis. International open workshop, University of Pisa 11 November 2019
- 2. Research project • Towards Eco-Welfare State: Orchestrating for Systemic Impact (ORSI) studies and develops steering practices that enable fair and legitimate transformation to a Finnish eco-welfare state • The consortium consists of Tampere University, Aalto University, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland • The project is funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland (2019-2025) 1
- 3. Starting point • The transition to an eco- welfare state needs to happen during the coming decade • Wide agreement on sustainable policy goals • Building on existing research on transition and sustainable scenarios 2
- 4. Goals for sustainability 3 17 Sustainable development goals 169 targets 232 indicators Folke, Carl, et al. "Social-ecological resilience and biosphere- based sustainability science." Ecology and Society 21.3 (2016).
- 5. Decarbonization 4 2.1.2020Lisää alatunniste IPCC 2018 1.5 degree lifestyle -report
- 6. Reductions in material use 5 Schandl, H., Fischer‐Kowalski, M., West, J., Giljum, S., Dittrich, M., Eisenmenger, N., ... & Krausmann, F. (2018). Global material flows and resource productivity: forty years of evidence. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 22(4), 827-838.
- 7. Wellbeing within planetary boundaries 6
- 8. However: how to steer systemic transformation towards eco-welfare state? 7
- 9. Challenges • The current societal steering mechanisms with sector-specific measures and targets bound by limited electoral and budgetary terms cannot provide a solution. • Sporadic and sectoral measures with ex-post evaluation are slow, inefficient and exclusive to reach towards a systemic change. • the complex interdependencies and interactions of different levels of governance not acknowledged. • Addressing global environmental and social challenges requires a qualitatively different social and environmental policy governance network. • Need to create shared understandings of legitimacy, accountability and democracy between government, participants in governance and general public. 8
- 10. Towards an integrated eco-welfare state - Ecological state – a state which places ecological considerations at the core of its activity” (Meadowcroft 2005) - requires capacity to implement effective steering strategies and policy instruments • Eco-social policies = policy instruments that serve two goals: environmental in reducing emissions, and social in recognizing and meeting a basic need, reducing energy bills and building useful employment. (Gough 2017, 143) • ‘An active and interventionist innovative state’ (Gough 2017): to overcome conflicting targets on combining effective societal steering, integrated social and environmental policy governance networks, socially just solutions and participation of all
- 11. Impact-driven governance: to take a step forward • Helps to translate long-term policy goals into concrete societal impacts that can be quantified and measured (Mazzucato 2018) • Extends the time-frame combined with urgent action, policy coherence and inclusion, and future-oriented evaluation • Impacts arise from interactions between multiple interrelated actors, not from ‘atomistic’ model of policy measures focusing on individual organizations or policies • Involved actors explore potential routes to achieve the desired impacts, stimulating the search for innovative solutions (Georghiou et al. 2014) 10
- 12. Orchestration as a key element of impact-driven governance • Enhances governing bodies’ capacities to coordinate long-term actions by enlisting intermediary actors • Aims to steer the activities of individual actors to find a common path towards eco-social impact, or by creating and steering multi-actor networks towards eco-social impact • Intermediators of different kinds are central agents in orchestration → Our aim is to better understand how intermediaries come to existence, retain required freedoms and contribute towards a common goal in multi-level and multi-actor settings 11
- 13. The organization of the research project 12
- 14. Research themes and questions ORSI focuses on four themes: • Dynamic public administration and budgeting: What are the means of governance and politics to steer Finland towards the boundaries of our planet - in a dynamic but fair way? • Equal transition in everyday life of citizens: How to enable the transition in a socially just way and strengthening citizen participation? • Responsible innovation processes: What is the broader role of innovation policies in solving social and environmental challenges? • Steering of consumption choices: How are the consumption of natural resources and opportunities to consume distributed in the Finnish society and what digital tools support the changes in everyday life? 13
- 15. Strategic research • The Strategic Research Council (SRC) funds high-quality research that has great societal impact. The research should seek to find concrete solutions to grand challenges that require multidisciplinary approaches. An important element of such research is active collaboration between those who produce new knowledge and those who use it. • ORSI speeds up the transition with multiple stakeholder groups relevant for transformation towards eco-welfare state. They include citizens, policy makers, ministries, associations, mediated networks, companies, municipalities and researchers both in Finland and abroad. 14