Global challenges related to climate change, urbanization and species loss have created a need for green transitions. These complex changes have widespread consequences and long time-horizons, making the related policies inherently knowledge-intensive, often leaving citizens distant from expert-driven discussions and political decision-making. At the same time the political decisions significantly impact the daily lives of citizens, and the distance between decision-making and citizens may fuel political polarization. 

The Material Democracy project explores and develops new ways to improve and widen participation in Finland’s environmental and energy policymaking and its implementation. It does not only focus on the transparency of and inclusion in policy formation but seeks to develop participation processes so that they truly benefit policy processes.  

To these ends, the project advances a new perspective of democratic participation that attends to the material and social arrangements through which participation happens, both in terms of their effects and the potential there is in developing them.