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Sitra is dedicated to addressing societal challenges that shape our world. Our international programmes work with partners to solve global challenges, enhance well-being and boost economic growth within earth’s carrying capacity.
What is this about?
Sitra’s international programmes are a unique combination of diverse expertise, extensive international networks and agile operations. These enable us to contribute to solving global challenges, enhancing well-being both in Finland and worldwide, and accelerating economic growth within the limits of nature’s carrying capacity.
Sitra is a trusted partner in the EU and globally through targeted, collaborative, high-impact projects. Our international programmes operate mainly with external funding alongside Sitra’s funds. Our programmes build on the strengths from Sitra’s recognised work on foresight and societal training, agile pilots, studies, practical solutions and tools on versatile topics.
What are we doing?
Our current work focuses on addressing societal challenges that shape our world: sustainability transition, data and AI, democracy and polarisation, and economic growth.
Sustainability transition
Sitra is globally recognised for its though leadership in the circular economy and for organising the annual World Circular Economy Forum, a global platform for advancing circularity across the globe.
Global circular economy
The World Circular Economic Forum (WCEF) is an annual conference and a global community that advances the global circular economy through innovation, collaboration and sustainable practices. Since 2017, the WCEF has brought together thousands of people and hundreds of organisations from more than 168 countries. The circular economy is the only viable economic model that can help us build a fair and sustainable future for all. Each annual forum is funded jointly by Sitra and global partners. The next edition of the forum will take place in São Paulo, Brazil, in May 2025.
Currently, we are preparing for the launch of the European Union Circular Economy Resource Centre which will facilitate peer-to-peer exchanges and partnerships between EU and third-country stakeholders, fostering the uptake of sound circular economy policies and business models worldwide.
The PSLifestyle project inspires people to adopt positive and sustainable lifestyles across Europe and provides insights for policy making to support the transition. Based on Sitra’s lifestyle test and 100 sustainable deeds, the project has been a huge success with more than 1.5 million tests made in Finland alone. The renewed lifestyle test and personalised tools are available already in 9 EU countries and have been used more than 288,000 times. The project is co-funded by the EU Horizon 2020.
Publications on sustainability transition
Read more about Sitra’s work on the sustainability transition.
Data and AI
Sitra has contributed strongly to evolving data and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, in particular in the European Union and Finland, around topics such as industrial data, open source LLMs, domain specific LLMs for public administration together with Finnish ministries, innovation challenges in Regulatory Technology (automated compliance), digital product passports, misinformation, societal impacts of social media and other platforms, etc. Sitra is also a lead or partner in several EU-funded projects regarding the twin transition, health data and European data spaces in general.
Sitra is keen on working with international partnerships in the areas of data and AI to respond to the biggest challenges of our time.
Future well-being solutions
TEHDAS2, a joint action funded by the European Union and member states, creates concrete guidelines and technical specifications for using health data in EU It aims for harmonised implementation of a new legislation called European Health Data Space which facilitates research, innovation and policymaking. The benefits of the secondary use of health data include providing better healthcare services and personalised care for people, thereby saving lives, increasing business opportunities for companies and saving costs for societies. The project involves 29 countries, is coordinated by Sitra and runs until December 2026.
Valo brings together Nordic and Baltic countries. It offers them a platform to discuss and share experiences when planning and implementing the European Health Data Space regulation. The project also pilots the cross-border collaboration research in the Nordics. VALO is coordinated by Sitra and funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.
The Data Spaces Support Centre supports the creation and implementation of data spaces in Europe, enhancing data sharing and innovation across sectors. The joint project in which Sitra is a partner, runs until March 2026, is funded by the EU’s Digital Europe programme and coordinated by Fraunhofer Institute in Germany.
Publications on data and AI
Read more about Sitra’s work related to data and AI.
Democracy and polarisation
Strengthening democracy and increasing citizen participation is one of Sitra’s focus areas. More specifically, we have experimented open-source civic technology solutions, such as the Polis collaborative platform. We have implemented regional and nation-wide Polis conversations together with Finnish regional and central authorities, and thus gained experience and an understanding of the current bottlenecks for citizens and the emerging “civic tech industry.”
Sitra is also contributing to the discussion on constitutional artificial intelligence (AI) and alignment assemblies for AI. There is an increasing trend of integrating AI in civic tech that also comes with great opportunities and risks.
We are contemplating new international actions with willing partners.
Read more about Sitra’s work on democracy and polarisation.
Projects
Here is what we are currently working with.
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