Strengthening National Dialogues (FI0035)

We will strengthen inclusion, mutual understanding and the knowledge base in preparing of policy measures through dialogues. • We will establish and expand National dialogues together with civil society actors. The aim is to increase the number of participants and organisers in these dialogues. • We will improve the effectiveness of National dialogues by producing shorter summaries and highlighting the results of the dialogues for the use of the ministries’ leadership. We will also make the impact of information created via dialogues visible to the participants. • We will develop the utilisation of the results of national dialogues in cooperation with the organisers of dialogues. We will also strengthen the utilisation of information obtained through dialogues at other administrative levels (wellbeing services counties and municipalities). • We will utilise national dialogues and their results as part of the Government’s futures work, for example in the preparation of foresight reports. • We will strengthen dialogue competence and the use of dialogues: we will integrate dialogue work into the open democracy network (see commitment 3).

Action Plan Review

Commitment 1. 1: Strengthening inclusion, mutual understanding, and evidence-based policymaking through dialogues

Commitment 1.1 Strengthening inclusion, mutual understanding and evidence-based policymaking through dialogues (Ministry of Finance)

For a complete description of the commitment, see commitment 1.1 in the action plan here.

Context and objectives:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government launched Lockdown Dialogues – a series of online and face-to-face public engagement events to discuss citizens’ experiences and concerns during the pandemic. [1] The Open Government Strategy that Finland adopted during its fourth action plan (2019-2023) prioritized dialogue in society as one of the key goals of open government efforts in Finland. In the mid-term assessment, the government stated the need to incorporate this new priority in the action plan, [2] and introduced a new commitment to establish dialogues with citizens as a regular form of civic participation. [3]

The aim of this new civic participation format is to strengthen trust in society by giving citizens the chance to meet people from diverse sectors and discuss issues that are important to them. [4] Although the Finnish government enjoys high public trust compared to the OECD average, trust in government has declined over the years (from 76 percent in 2007 to 61 percent in 2021 [5]). [6] As experts considered the Lockdown Dialogues successful, the OECD recommended the government to continue this type of dialogues to improve the government’s interaction with vulnerable and harder-to-reach societal groups. [7]

During the fourth action plan, the Ministry of Finance developed a model of national dialogues with the help of the public innovation fund Sitra, the Timeout Foundation, and Dialogue Academy. The national dialogues organizers mainly use the ‘Timeout’ method [8] to facilitate discussions where small groups of people meet online or face-to-face in different locations and share their views on a predefined topic of societal importance. The government and civil society built a network of dialogue organizers from the public, private, and non-profit sector, and set up a governance structure to coordinate future dialogues. The operational core group involves public sector organizations (the Prime Minister’s office and the municipality of Tuusula), a public think tank (Sitra), a CSO (Child Protection Association), and a private consultancy (Dialogue Academy). The core group coordinates the selection of topics based on input from dialogue participants and organizes background and orientation materials as well as trainings for dialogue facilitators. [9] Dialogue organizers share discussion notes with the core group, and the core group involves researchers to produce summaries of each round of dialogues based on the notes. [10] The core group publishes all summaries on a central website. [11]

The core group coordinated a series of Democracy Defense dialogues in the spring of 2022 to discuss ways of protecting democratic societies after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. [12] The Ministry of Interior then piloted the national dialogue model to discuss migration issues in autumn 2022. [13] The first nationwide dialogues applying the new model were held in spring 2023, focusing on how citizens were coping with uncertainty and continuous crises. In 2022 and 2023, about 230 events engaging close to 2,000 participants were held throughout Finland before the start of the fifth action plan. [14] In addition, the dialogue format was used in other events such as the national CSO Academies (Commitment 1 in the fourth action plan).

Potential for results: Modest

The fifth action plan sets two main objectives: 1) engaging new target groups and increasing the diversity of dialogue organizers and participants, and 2) fostering the utilization of input from the dialogues in policy-making processes. The government has already made efforts to engage more diverse groups. Several organizations working with marginalized and vulnerable groups have already organized dialogue events, e.g. those representing children and youth, immigrants, Romani people, and visually impaired people. [15] To increase diversity, the core group maps what groups are missing from discussions and invites them to organize dialogues. [16]

The aim to feed the results of dialogues into policy-making processes appears more challenging. According to Riitta Kittilä, a civil society representative in the MSF, CSOs would like to see more focus on the actual usage of dialogue results and the impact of dialogues on policy. [17] Citizens who participated in the Ministry of Interior’s immigration dialogues also expressed the expectation that public authorities effectively address the issues raised in the dialogues. [18] So far, the government has not systematically measured to what extent public authorities at the local, regional, and national level have used input from dialogues in their work. According to Katju Holkeri from the Ministry of Finance, policy reports seldom make an explicit reference to the dialogues. [19] CSOs tend to believe the dialogues, while novel and interesting, are less impactful on policy decisions than traditional methods such as CSO advocacy or advisory board work. [20] However, the dialogues are intended to supplement, rather than replace, these traditional methods.

The government plans to encourage authorities at different administrative levels to use the dialogues to inform public policy. A particular area in which the Ministry of Finance expects to see more use of dialogues is strategic foresight. Most ministries occasionally publish foresight reports, and every national government presents a foresight report to the Parliament once during its term. Although the government has not defined a specific target regarding the extent to which foresight reports are expected to take up dialogue results, the Ministry of Finance expects to see more explicit references to dialogues in such reports in the future. [21]

To increase the use of dialogue results, the commitment foresees the preparation of shorter thematic summaries of dialogues and forwarding the results to government agencies, municipalities, and the new wellbeing services counties. In February 2024, the government plans to discuss the results of the ongoing dialogue on the role of communities in societal wellbeing at a public sector leadership event, which will bring together top managers from local, regional, and national-level public administration. [22] Moreover, the core group works to enroll more municipalities to the network of regular dialogue organizers. It is reasonable to believe these measures will increase public authorities’ interest in using dialogue results in their work.

In addition to the goals of participant diversity and utilization of results, the Ministry of Finance and the core group want the experience of participating in the dialogues to be meaningful to citizens, regardless of the dialogues’ eventual impact on policy. [23] The perceived value of participation and the subjective feeling of being listened to is an important area of impact in light of the dialogues’ aim to increase citizens’ trust in government and fellow citizens. While there is anecdotal evidence that participation in the dialogues has increased participants’ trust in each other, [24] the impact of the dialogues on public trust has not been systematically researched so far.

This commitment could lead to increased diversity of dialogue organizers and participants, as well as increased usage of input from dialogues in policymaking. However, given the baseline established by the fourth action plan, and the lack of clear objectives for the fifth action plan, this commitment would likely have modest rather than transformative impacts on policy outcomes, the participation of marginalized and vulnerable groups, and public trust.

Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations during implementation

Despite the absence of clear targets in the action plan, the MSF has already defined several indicators to monitor the results of this commitment. These include the expansion of the dialogues in terms of societal reach, organizers, and participants; public perception of the dialogues; improvements in dialogic skills; the perceived usefulness and actual use of input from dialogues in public decision-making and foresight. [25] To achieve the full potential of this commitment, the government and the MSF could start by formulating ambitious and measurable targets to assess progress against these indicators. Since one of the aims of the dialogues was to increase public trust, the government could also systematically study the effects of participation in the dialogues on citizens’ trust in government and democratic institutions. To measure progress, the core operational group could:

If the government can demonstrate the actual usage of input from dialogues in policy-making processes, this could increase citizens’ interest in participating in the dialogues as well as their trust in government. To increase usage of the results, it is key to secure buy-in from local, regional, and national authorities, which is also one of the greatest challenges of this commitment. It is particularly important to engage municipalities as this administrative level often deals with citizens’ most pressing concerns and is where it is the easiest to demonstrate a direct link between public participation and policy outcomes. To ensure buy-in, it would be useful to involve local and regional authorities in the dialogue process from the outset, i.e. actively recruit municipalities as regular organizers of national dialogues (which is already being done), involve them in formulating dialogue topics, and provide them advice and tools to conduct local dialogues on topics of local importance. The core operational group could also seek regular feedback from public authorities and adjust the format of the dialogues to ensure the outputs can be effectively used in policymaking.

A few additional steps could strengthen the impact of this commitment:

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