Argumenta Grants fund projects that seek answers to multidisciplinary questions of major importance to society. The funded projects are topical in nature and aim far into the future. They seek to achieve extensive debate on issues of academic and social import.

The aim of Argumenta projects is to bring together researchers from various disciplines and to make the outcomes of the resulting debates available to a public broader than the scientific community. The idea is to open doors for influencing decision-making in society. This year, each of the chosen projects received EUR 150,000 in funding. They will be conducted between 2023 and 2025.

Nuri Emrah Aydinonat (PhD) and team: Role of economics in society in an era of global crises

According to Associate Professor Nuri Emrah Aydinonat, PhD (Helsinki university, TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science) and his team, economics and economic policy are currently facing novel challenges, which make it necessary to reconsider their contents, procedures and communication strategies. There is growing pressure due to extensive ongoing crises, such as the pandemic, war, climate change and the extinction wave, as well as to challenges in society such as inequality, an ageing population and the impact of artificial intelligence. The validity and social status of economics depend on how well the field can adjust to the challenges of a changing world.

Aydinonat and his team organise cross-disciplinary events, such as panel discussions and lectures, pertaining to the aforementioned challenges among others, as well as their consequences. The topics are discussed from the perspectives of decision-making, methodology, institutions and sustainability. An overarching question is how comprehensively must economics and economic policy reinvent themselves, and how, if they are to respond to current crises and future challenges in society and maintain their position of authority.

Jenni Kulmala (PhD, Gerontology and Public Health) and team: Conditions for a good life for persons with dementia

With the ageing of the population in Finland, the number of persons with dementia is expected to rise, even to triple, in the next three decades. Instead of today’s around 200,000 persons with dementia, the number is likely to exceed half a million in Finland by 2050.

“Worsening dementia affects not only the patient but also, significantly, the people close to them. Therefore the various forms of dementia are predicted to affect the majority of the population in one way or another. In coming years, ours will no longer be a welfare society if the wellbeing of persons with dementia and their family and friends is not brought more clearly into focus,” explains Jenni Kulmala, Tenure Track Professor of Gerontology at the University of Tampere, who is leading the project.

This Argumenta Project will raise broad, multidisciplinary social debates on dementia and its related themes. The project relates to fulfilling a series of multidisciplinary futures workshops, which will feature extensive cross-scientific debates. They are expected to generate new, more comprehensive understanding that can be used to make the society more dementia-friendly and to innovatively and sustainably prepare for a future in which most of us are, in one way or another, affected by progressive dementia in our daily lives.

Anna Mustonen (MSc, Social Science) and team: Margins of the Sustainability Revolution

The effects of global environmental crises and geopolitical turmoil reach the microlevel of individuals’ and communities’ daily lives in diverse ways. Similarly, the impact of national and regional policies, related for instance to welfare or regional development, are visible in various ways at the local level, and individuals react to them each from their own life contexts.

Ongoing trends in society include not only the rising voice of the political extreme right and conservative factions, but also movements against environmental and sustainability sciences, questioning of the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss, and the positioning of ecological sustainability as a stark antithesis to economic sustainability.

“This kind of hostile juxtaposition leads to extremist views. We want to build cross-disciplinary links between the social, cultural and ecological dimensions of sustainability in the places where conditions for conducting a controlled sustainability revolution are unfavourable but the need for such a revolution is great,” explains the project’s leader, doctoral researcher Anna Mustonen, MSc.

The project will give a voice to scientists and lay people alike, as the events will take the form of workshops that gather together people of various ages and from diverse backgrounds, who have been left in the margins (inhabitants of remote areas, as well as marginalised, vulnerable, polarised or sidelined people). They will take part in facilitated workshops, bringing their own perspectives to the table and explaining their positions in the sustainability revolution.

Professor Seppo Vainio and team: Healthy Environment, Healthy Humans

“Nature is the foundation of humanity. Our current efficiency is, however, endangering the existence of both nature and humanity. Is our anthropocentric culture, with its technical advances, at the end of the road or at the beginning of something new?” asks Professor Seppo Vainio, who together with his team is striving to build a multidisciplinary and integrated overall picture of the relationship between nature and humans.

The Healthy Environment, Healthy Humans project is striving for a comprehensive view of the interwoven mesh created by environmental health, use of natural resources and digitalisation. The project will discuss, among other things, how human immunity against diseases is created and how it evolves, and how our relationship with nature influences the appearance of new pandemics.

The second part of the project considers the role of regions in the sustainability revolution, and their effects on wellbeing. How does the shift in our relationship with nature influence the kinds of societies in which we want to live? The third part relates to the digital revolution in our connections with nature. Has our urbanised, IT-enabled interaction distanced us from our natural roots? What about the new opportunities brought by digital solutions? Will our leap across the digital gap also help us to overcome other chasms and to restore our connections with nature, with each other, with ourselves and our experiences?

The approach for Argumenta is emphatically cross-disciplinary. Although the same problems are often studied in different disciplines, it may be difficult to find a common language for formulating solutions. The purpose of Argumenta grants is to apply interdisciplinary dialogue to producing new answers and conclusions for challenging issues in society, and to communicate these results to a broader audience than the academic community.

Professor Eeva Furman and the Sustainability Panel Community team from the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) received EUR 110,000 for their Six Paths to Sustainability project.

There are many worrying trends in the world: inequality is growing, biodiversity is shrinking, climate change is advancing and waste is accumulating. A conscious and quick paradigm shift is needed: a sustainability revolution.

– For most people, even the term ‘sustainability revolution’ is unfamiliar and off-putting. For people to understand it and be prepared to act accordingly, new methods and ways of talking about it are needed, Furman says. The Six Paths to Sustainability project brings together researchers from various disciplines with ordinary people to verbalise the sustainability revolution.

Next year, the topic will be discussed in libraries and museums all around Finland, with people working together to create pictorial, verbal and aural stories. These will help in shaping a shared understanding of what constitutes sustainable food and energy, how urbanisation and the economy can become sustainable, and what new opportunities there are for well-being.

– A revolutionary turn onto a sustainable path is still possible. We trust that everyone in Finland wants to be involved in building a safe future for us all, Furman explains.

Panu Halme, PhD, and his team from the University of Jyväskylä received EUR 150,000 for their project Towards a Common Understanding on Changes in Sustainability of Forest Use.

There are many players taking part in efforts to determine the sustainability of forestry in public discussion. “Forestry operators and their stakeholders have their own interests, based on which they tend to brand the forest industry as either highly sustainable or completely unsustainable. This causes debates on forestry sustainability to go around in circles. What the situation especially demands is a broader, science-based evaluation and definition of sustainability-related concepts, and improvements to how they can be measured,” says Halme.

The project brings together researchers and stakeholders with an interest in the sustainability of forest use, to discuss what the elements of sustainability are in Finnish forestry. The objective is to identify the elements of sustainability that the various players consider important when measuring and evaluating sustainability. The project will analyse the principles of measuring these various elements, as well as the related challenges; develop indicators for assessing progress in these elements; and generate methods for visualising the conflicts in these elements, as well as their impacts.

Assistant Professor Panu Savolainen and his team at Aalto University received EUR 145,000 for their project Sustainable Construction, Techno-Economic Perspectives and the Value of Architectural Heritage.

The life cycle of the built environment has a significant impact on the fulfilment of targets related to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. Finland’s building stock is being renewed at an increasing pace, however, and even in city centres younger and younger buildings are being torn down. The topic is regularly brought up in the media.

– The factors affecting the life cycle of buildings are financial, technical, functional and heritage-related, as well as ones of urbanisation, location and ownership patterns. Parallel to these are questions of the society’s values and opinions, politics and economic control. Due to the differences between these fields and methods, each argument is very different. So far, especially in the public domain, discussions have mostly consisted of recognising the problem and bringing it up sporadically, Savolainen explains.

– Currently the demolition of modern buildings is not debated enough between various experts, nor is the debate sufficiently deep or solution-centric. Publicly, discussions are led by a reliance on authorities and heightened emotions. Future opinion leaders – children and young people – are not included in understandable and easily accessible ways, Savolainen says. The purpose of the project is to deepen and increase public debate on the fate of modern buildings, and on the various points of view involved. The aim is to build dialogue between academic disciplines and with the public, and to make this dialogue more understandable for the society and for political decision-makers.

Further information:

Juhana Lassila, Director of Cultural Affairs, Finnish Cultural Foundation, juhana.lassila@skr.fi, +358 9 6128 1230
Professor Eeva Furman, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), eeva.furman@ymparisto@fi, +358 29 5251123
Dr Panu Halme, University of Jyväskylä, panu.halme@jyu.fi, +358 40 8054945
Assistant Professor Panu Savolainen, Aalto University, panu.savolainen@aalto.fi, +358 50 475 6727