Inclusive and sustainable communities

Building a fair, sustainable and inspiring future requires a shared understanding of the longer-term picture of change, states Sitra’s recent megatrend analysis (2023), and we couldn’t agree more. We are living turbulent times, but shouldn’t allow that to blurry, or to kill, visions for better future.

We humans certainly have few big transformation and learning challenges in front of us, but let’s remember that we have managed to, for example create an international system for human rights or space technology that enabled the development of public-good applications for e.g. meteorology and navigation, that both seemed like total impossibilities at some point in history.

Sitra’s megatrend analysis highlights an urgent need for ecological reconstruction, which means transitioning to a society that improves the state of nature and human well-being.

Ecological reconstruction requires for example strenghtening trust and participation in the society, finding new ways for taking action and influencing, adopting sustainable lifestyle, and renewing the current economical models.

At the same time, growing cultural and ethnic diversity challenges and encourages us all to learn new ways for building communities, trust, and active citizenship. Questions of participation and sense of belonging are crucial building blocks, not just for human well-being and social inclusion, but also to ecological transformation.

Growing cultural and ethnic diversity also encourages us to re-think how do we talk about concepts of sustainable lifestyle or just green transition. Migrants are a very diverse group ‒ some have been climate activists in their home countries, some have very little exposure to questions of ecological sustainability. We should make sure that also migrants have equitable access to information, discussion and public processes concerning sustainable development.

At the same time, we should acknowledge that there is a relatively large group of adult migrants living in Finland whose motivators for adopting sustainable lifestyle, differ from the majority population. This requires us to achieve a better understanding of this diverse segment, as well as specific communications and environmental education activities that fit their needs.

We should also remember that networks of skilled people reaching over national borders are created (also) through migration, and this is an asset when thinking of solutions to ecological crisis which concerns us all, who are living on this planet. By including migrants on equitable basis in the processes of improving the state of nature and human well-being, we can achieve better results.

Building inclusive and sustainable communities requires us also to find new ways for participation and doing together over the linguistic, ethnic and cultural barriers. In our work we are trying to focus on finding common needs, motives and areas of interest that can bring very different people together. These spaces can be for example workshops where people develop grassroots level circular-economy solutions that work on community level, or cultural events that support people to adopt a culturally and ethnically diverse community life.

To succeed in ecological construction, it is evident that we need to change. We know that trying to just stop the old behaviour, is not a good way for making change. We also know that change is a process and cannot be done at once: any transformation requires action on different levels, also on the very grassroots level that is close to people.

We believe that the bottom-up approach applies also for changing the way we think. If we can understand the meaning and need of ecological reconstruction in our own life first, we can more easily start developing the horizon and link our ideas of change to national and global level.

For this reason the main question we are trying to solve is: How do we learn new ways of thinking and behaving, to make our community more inclusive and sustainable?

We expect to see

1) Increased sense of place and belonging, societal and social knowledge, and active citizenship among migrants living in Finland.

2) Culturally and ethnically diverse, multilingual communities in sub-urbs and villages develop and practice grassroots level circular-economy solutions, and support local level participation and well-being of people.

3) Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) skills and environmental awareness among local residents are being strengthened through grassroots level activities (e.g. upcycling workshops or family activities).

4) Public discussion, information sharing and awareness raising activities about sustainability transformation become multilingual and inclusive, and support diverse population to imagine alternative futures.

5) Increased understanding of migrants as a very diverse target group among professionals who are in charge of public information sharing, awareness raising, environmental education and other communications activities.

6) Ecological and socially sustainable products, that also provoke emotions, inform and raise awareness about sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion, are being made.

Why is this important?

• Simply, because we are part of nature and also live from it. Despite the long period of technological progress, we continue being dependent on the environment.

  • Our natural environment provides essential ecosystem services, like for example water, oxygen production, and pollination for food production, which are currently being damaged, degraded and destroyed. Human survival really depends on learning to value, respect, and protect the ecosystem services that are essential to all of us.

  • The use of natural resources must be reduced to a level that is globally sustainable. We already know that technology alone, will not solve the problem. In Finland we should reduce our per capita consumption with about 33 % (BIOS Research, 2019).

  • Consumption should focus on sustainable products that provide environmental, social and economic benefits while protecting public health and environment over their whole life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials until the final disposal.

• The transition to a circular economy has been slow and uneven in Europe. In other words we are not yet using the full potential of the circular economy model.

  • Every European consumes on average 14 tons of raw materials per year, and produces 5 tons of waste (European Parliament, 2023). The circular economy establishes a more sustainable production and consumption model in which raw materials are kept longer in production cycles and can be used repeatedly, therefore generating much less waste.

• According to a 2021 EU Commission’s consumer conditions survey, 56% of EU consumers pay attention to the environmental impact of goods and services ‒ but nearly half of the consumers still do not. We humans are a diverse punch who do not share the same values, attitudes or lifestyles, but we all have potential for making sustainable choices, when the prompt meets our motivation and abilities (B=MAP theory by BJ Fogg). Therefore, sustainable lifestyle knowledge and discussion should be more diverse, engaging and empowering and better targeted to meet the needs of different consumer segments.

• The sustainability transformation must be fair, if we wish to succeed.

  • The Doughnut economic model by Kate Raworth/Oxfam provides us guidelines for re-thinking production and consumption of goods and services. The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life-supporting systems.

  • In Finland the Just Transition Now campaign has created principles for a just ecological transition which includes points of human rights in the core of a just ecological transition and that a just ecological transition decreases poverty, and social and economic inequality.