An interview with Tiina Kähö and Iina Oilinki about how the Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation has been driving collaboration between the public and private sectors for the planet, people and prosperity.
Cities need a vibrant business community that drives economic development and provides innovative solutions to some of their most challenging climate issues. Businesses, on the other hand, need healthy and sustainable cities to thrive. Cities and companies can accelerate the shift toward shared sustainability goals by working together, but sometimes institutional barriers make the collaboration difficult. Five years ago, a coalition of public and private organizations in Helsinki, Finland, committed to cutting their emissions in line with climate science, set out on a mission to solve this problem...
Helsinki City Centre by Tapio Haaja
The process of accelerating collaboration around climate solutions was initially driven by the business community in Helsinki and eventually ‘orchestrated’ by a small but committed non-profit group. Tiina Kähö, an environmental engineer by training and Iina Oilinki, an anthropologist turned city-systems-change advisor, are the masterminds behind this initiative. Both women are hugely dedicated to their work and even virtually, sitting at their respective dining tables, thousands of miles apart and speaking via a Zoom call, you can feel their warmth, energy and passion - through the eager gestures of their hands and the reflective pauses and smiles before their next response.
“From the beginning, they [businesses] were pushing the cities [in the Helsinki metropolitan region] to be more ambitious. The companies were really saying “We’re doing a lot, we have solutions, we have ambitious climate goals of our own; why don’t you do it as well?” Tiina tells us. “It was really an understanding within the business community that we could do more to deliver against climate agreements like Paris, especially with the cities. We [the Foundation] wanted to showcase the home market in Helsinki to the world and to serve as a window into what’s possible for companies in the city and beyond. To do this we had to find ways to closely collaborate with the private sector, innovators in Research & Development, and the state.”
The Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation grew into a community of 29 public and private partners, building multi-stakeholder ecosystems to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable world. All parties are equal participants and financially contribute to the Foundation, sharing their stake in building climate solutions and making this a neutral body. Crucially, the board is composed of senior staff, Mayors and CEOs. This high-level participation means board members hold the ultimate decision-making power for their organizations - making board decisions quick and effective. Board members also act as ambassadors for the initiative in their own organizations.
Since its inception, the Foundation has engaged over 150 businesses to deliver climate solutions, from Foundations flagship project Closed Plastic Circle, where the goal is to comprehensively cover the entire life cycle of plastic, from product design to collection and reprocessing into new products, to earlier projects like creating the world’s densest air quality measurement system, now also being used in Nanjing, China. This idea of creating an ‘ecosystem’ of public-private partners and taking a systems change approach is critical to Iina and Tiina, and the legacy of the Foundation’s work. “‘The term ecosystem’ is often overused, but here it is used in the original sense: each of these organizations need each other,” Iina says, “Take away the waste companies or producers of plastics or the supply chain, and it won’t work. Showing that you need to involve all parties in order to make systemic changes, is important to the outcome.”
Many would assume that getting such a diverse range of actors to work towards one goal or project would be hard, but Tiina and Iina disagree. “It is possible,” Tiina says. “Before COVID-19, because there was a time before COVID,” she laughs, “we developed a small community that we called the ‘Smart and Clean Community’ with more than 1,000 people on the mailing list. We had morning coffee sessions and gatherings. In this Community, we acted as the spider in the web and became the glue between the city and the Smart and Clean companies. There have been a lot of discussions and meetings between the different stakeholders; all of them had their own targets. We’ve been successful in bringing them together and making this a successful community.” Iina adds, “If you look at the Foundation’s board meetings of the last five years, you can see this change reflected in how the language developed: in the beginning, they were talking from their own perspective, whereas in the end, they started to see this as ‘a whole’ and from each other’s point of view.”
“In this Community, we acted as the spider in the web and became the glue between the city and the smart and clean companies.”
Tiina Kähö
Although this is a localized initiative, Tiina and Iina - as well as their colleague Jaana Pelkonen, who has been the key person in leading the Foundation’s change projects - are part of a much bigger global community of experts, pushing the boundaries of how cities and businesses collaborate to be sustainable. “It really has been about thinking from the point of view of the whole world,” Iina says. “Our idea has been that if we are able to trial and achieve those results here, those can be scaled to other places as well”. Tiina adds, “Iina is right, the whole world knows we need to do something, but we’ve been able to take that next step on how to make those bigger, structural changes, and how to do them in a more systematic way.”
Iina speaks about working with other cities to deliver the systemic, sustainable change that is required. “If we look back at other cities we’ve talked to, for example, we met with the Head of another large city’s waste and recycling board, we described what we do with plastics and they said “We’ve never looked at it [recycling] this way. We’ve only thought about it [success] from the point of view of collecting more plastics.” But we explained “If you only think about recycling, you end up with a huge pile of recycled plastics that nobody is going to use and that’s not going to change the world. If you are only focused on one sector then you are not thinking about the whole chain of what happens afterwards”.
Tiina reflects “In the beginning, our focus was home-based: we wanted to focus on Helsinki, do real things and not only share PowerPoints but to really make things happen. As we went along it became clearer that we need to make these structural changes globally.” Iina adds “We see the planet as our client because the climate crisis is such an urgent matter that we really should be looking everywhere for the best solutions and copying them.” Tiina adds “That’s why it has really been a joy for us to work with the City-Business Climate Alliance because it is a network that can amplify what we do to 100 global cities in the world - while also acting locally.” The Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation is one of four leading city-based organisations that share their examples and learnings with a global network of cities that make up the City-Business Climate Alliance (CBCA). The CBCA provides the most ambitious city and business leaders with a platform to convene, set joint commitments, co-create, and eventually implement projects that help cities deliver on their Climate Action Plans in line with the Paris Agreement.
“We see the planet as our client because the climate crisis is such an urgent matter that we really should be looking everywhere for the best solutions and copying them”
Iina Oilinki
At the end of June 2021, the Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation’s 5-year timeline comes to an end. While the Foundation’s ‘orchestrator’ role will disappear, the 29 partners and actors will continue to work on the foundation’s goals within their own organisations. Reflecting on the past years, Iina tells us, “We’ve done an incredible amount of work, that’s undeniable. But I don’t think we have achieved all that we could have.” “What we still need to work on is the feeling of responsibility from the different actors. We had a very good structure with the funding and governance model, but if I were to start from scratch, I would first seek a real commitment from the different actors and get them to look more at how their own actions and organisation can contribute to a common goal.”
Tiina nods and agrees, “In the beginning, we were not successful in gathering commitment to a shared goal quickly enough. This gave room for the cities and different stakeholders to dwell on what is important to them and stopped us from delivering.” “My advice to other cities is that leadership from mayors is really required, and if you find good individuals and people who can see the big picture, that’s really important.”
When asked what they are most proud of from their work in the last years, Iina says “I’ve been working with research, development, and innovation projects for 20 years now and I’ve been frustrated from doing pilots and then moving on to the next one [without the project reaching its full potential] - in the end, the impact of each project is quite small and the world isn’t really changed. And I’m not saying that the plastics project we did will save the world, but it follows this [systems-change] model that can be used for other challenges.” She adds “I think what is unique about us is that we have created a model that can be scaled to other sectors and contains a practical process for taking the steps needed.”
Tiina says “Yes, it has been a very ambitious project, and of course the world is not quite ready yet, but we should continue working on more systemic climate solutions. It has been a special five years - a learning experience for sure.”
Even though the Foundation itself is coming to a close, Tiina and Iina’s legacy will live on through the continuation of the projects in the metropolitan area of Helsinki and the relationships built between the different actors. Their advice and learnings will also continue to inform the CBCA initiative so that the model from Helsinki can be replicated in other cities across the world. As they state on their website and in their legacy video, “Fighting against the climate crisis is like conducting an orchestra. And like playing a symphony, impactful climate solutions can only be done together, instead of everyone going solo or everybody playing in dissonance... This is Finland’s free gift to the world. With our model, everyone can be a climate conductor in this common battle.”
To learn more, visit the Helsinki Smart & Clean Foundation website and watch their Legacy Video on Youtube. Visit the Testbed Helsinki website to learn more about future projects in the region. You can also learn more about the City-Business Climate Alliance on the CBCA website.