After more than a decade in Asia working to build governments’ use of evidence, I recently moved back to Finland. Here I’ve found commitment to evidence and innovation like nowhere else.
Kokeileva Suomi or Experimental Finland is a great example of the nation’s ‘readiness to innovate’. Set up by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä in 2015, it tests policies at local level and scales up those that work. For example, Finland’s experimental universal basic income scheme, which made international headlines in 2017.
Equally important, however, is that Kokeileva is coupled with careful planning. Each year, the Prime Minister’s Office publishes a plan to make sure that the ministries have access to the research they need to tackle varied and complex social problems.
To learn more about how the Finnish Government manages research evidence, I travelled to the Prime Minister’s Office in Helsinki. I met with Science Specialist Anna-Kaisa Lähteenmäki-Smith and Project Manager Sari Löytökorpi from the Government Policy Analysis Unit, which is in charge of coordinating the annual research plan.
The following interview offers insights into what lies behind Finland’s commitment to research evidence, and how its annual plan operates. Having worked with governments around the world to improve evidence-informed decision-making processes, I think there’s a lot that other governments can learn from Finland.
