Tuuli Hirvilammi. International workshop, University of Pisa. 11.11.2019.

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)
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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
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4. Goals for sustainability
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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
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2.1.2020Lisää alatunniste
IPCC 2018
1.5 degree
lifestyle -report

6. Reductions in material use
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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
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8. However: how to steer systemic transformation
towards eco-welfare state?
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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.
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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)
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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
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13. The organization of the research project
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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?
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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.
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16. Thank you!
Tuuli.hirvilammi@tuni.fi