The ecosystem of the Finnish decision-making

The systems of information-based decision making in different countries vary widely. The Finnish system is complex in nature and involves many different actors.

In our description, we have classified the actors in Finnish knowledge-based decision-making as follows:

1) Knowledge users (middle of the figure): Public institutions that make, prepare or participate in policy decisions.

2) Knowledge brokers (pink circle in the middle): Organisations that facilitate the interaction between the decision-making process and the scientific community and provide information to support decision-making. For example, science academies are science brokers.

3) Knowledge producers (on the outer ring): These are divided into two categories. At the inner end are actors whose main task is to produce researched knowledge (e.g. universities). In the outer ring, there are those whose role in knowledge production is secondary and who do not necessarily involve specifically science based knowledge.

This description of the system is a simplification. In reality, the roles of the different actors are not so categorical: for example, agencies and institutions both produce and exploit information. There are also links between actors that cannot be made visible here. For the purposes of this description, only the ministries have their own code colour, which is also used for the organisations that manage them. All actors are also presented here with equal weight.

Organisations that only fund research are not included.

When you click on the image, it opens as a pdf file, which gives you easy access to the different actors: the balls are links to the organisations’ own websites.