Collaborative Remedies for Fragmented Societies (CORE)
Public description of the goals at the beginning of the project
CORE will address the ability of Finnish political and system to cope with complex environmental planning and policy problems in fragmented 'post-truth' societies. It will experiment with collaborative approaches in real-life case studies to explore the potential, and limits, of collaborative governance mechanisms and inclusive knowledge practices to strengthen active civil society, facilitate reasoned public debate, increase trust between demographic groups and regain legitimacy of political institutions. The project will build novel and concrete solutions for engaging a broad range of societal actors in co-creation of solutions for contested environmental policy problems. It provides a sound basis for substantial regulatory improvements in Finland, supporting incorporating collaborative elements to regulatory reforms. CORE will combine interdisciplinary expertise with skills in facilitation and mediation and work in close collaboration with stakeholders and civil society actors.
Public description of the results at the end of the project
The CORE project developed and promoted approaches based on collaborative governance to address complex problems in Finnish environmental planning and policymaking. The project was built on action-oriented case studies, which worked as platforms for developing and analyzing collaborative processes with stakeholders. CORE built understanding on how collaborative processes can be applied in Finnish environmental decision making and provided several best-practice examples of collaborative environmental and natural resource management. The benefits from collaborative governance are evident in situations in which no party can solve the problem unilaterally but need to act and implement the solutions together. Collaboration can create diverse value to different actors and empower citizens with new tools to impact decision making. The project identified several factors in the Finnish legislation which both enable and hinder collaborative environmental management.
