A high-quality and effective education system is vital for municipalities and for Finland. As learning outcomes are deteriorating, it is particularly important to focus on lower-achieving pupils. A good example is the clear underperformance of boys compared to girls in literacy and science. Closing the learning gap will facilitate the transition to further education and employment as a happy and healthy resident of the municipality.

Early childhood education and care and pre-primary education play an important role in evening out differences in learning outcomes. High-quality, accessible early childhood education and care ensures that all children have a solid foundation for learning new things and living in an equal Finnish society.

Comprehensive schools also play an important role. Adequately resourced teaching and learning support measures provide good tools for those from less advantaged backgrounds. Particular attention should be paid to boys who perform poorly at school. On the other hand, teaching can encourage pupils who are already performing well to reach their full potential. STEM skills are important, and attention should also be paid to IT skills. High-quality guidance counselling helps pupils to make successful choices about their future. The scarcity of resources can be alleviated through collaboration between educational institutions across municipal borders and levels of education.

Continuing education for the staff in educational institutions is a worthwhile investment. Without the contribution of teachers, learning outcomes may continue to lag behind. Serious consideration should be given to the provision of education in English, also at the upper secondary level. The families of people coming to work in Finland from abroad need seamless support, as there may not be time, or even the need, to learn the national languages.

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly hard on children from less advantaged backgrounds. Opportunities for recreation and the development of adequate literacy skills are key to ensuring that as few as possible are excluded from society.

Municipalities have a key role to play in Finland’s emission reduction efforts, and they should support the achievement of Finland’s 2035 carbon neutrality target through their actions. This means achieving carbon neutrality in municipalities by 2030 at the latest. All municipalities should prepare climate plans, and small and geographically close municipalities should promote these plans in cooperation with each other. Municipalities should also promote adaptation to climate change, which poses challenges, for example, to the building stock and working conditions. The decision-making powers of municipalities extend to issues such as district heating and the promotion of sustainable mobility options. In addition, municipalities and wellbeing services counties have the opportunity to engage in climate work through public procurement in several sectors, such as construction. Many municipalities are also located in regions with major carbon sinks, which the municipalities can grow to accelerate their carbon neutrality efforts.

Municipal heat production is often based on district heat, the production of which should be made low-emission everywhere and a shift to non-combustion-based solutions should be made at the latest in the long term. These include industrial-scale heat pumps, electric boilers and heat reservoirs, waste heat recovery and, in large cities, small nuclear power plants. During the transition period, waste-to-energy plants, for example, produce computationally clean district heat. In order to even out consumption peaks energy networks, consumption flexibility must be promoted at all levels also in municipalities and wellbeing services counties.

In order to develop a low-emission transport system, mobility in urban areas must shift towards walking, cycling or public transport. At the same time, the electrification of passenger and freight transport must be promoted. Municipalities can best contribute to the electrification of transport by improving the charging opportunities of electric vehicles and through procurement.

Many emission reduction solutions will also benefit municipalities financially in the long term at the latest. The social acceptability of the climate measures put forward by municipalities can be further enhanced by returning the financial benefits of climate measures to local residents or by earmarking financial benefits for new climate measures. For example, tax revenues from wind power stations are an important source of income for many municipalities and can balance municipal finances and ensure critical services.

Municipalities also need to work ambitiously on behalf of nature. All municipalities must promote biodiversity, for example through conservation and nature corridors. The broader range of municipal nature conservation measures should be chosen individually by each municipality, taking into account factors such as the size of the municipality and the region. For example, green infrastructure is particularly important in cities, while in smaller municipalities, restoration is a vital measure. Municipalities and counties can also contribute to the wellbeing of nature through procurement.

Artificial intelligence is making its way into the workplace and society. At the same time, demands for more efficient public administration are increasing and no significant additional resources are on the horizon. Due to this, it is necessary to deploy AI tools for tasks for which they are best suited.

AI as such cannot make administrative decisions, but it can be used to support them. The automation of routine tasks and the streamlining of repetitive decisions are the most obvious applications. Municipalities and the public sector in general generate a huge amount of data and the processing of this data can be significantly facilitated by AI.

In the healthcare sector, for example, digitalisation has been going on for decades, but the transformation of approaches to digital organisations is still ongoing. Social work has also gained experience in using AI. AI tools are therefore here to stay, also in the work of wellbeing services counties. Guidance and encouragement should be provided for their adoption.

Public administration needs AI tools that are specifically designed for this purpose. For many municipalities, the introduction of a closed AI tool tailored for a specific purpose can be an expensive one-time investment. When developing AI tools for municipalities, we need to avoid the adoption of incompatible, duplicate systems. It should be ensured that data collected by the authorities is available in places where it is useful. At the same time, people should be able to decide how their data is used.

Cooperation between municipalities and wellbeing services counties is needed to develop suitable tools. Agile cooperation between, for example, several larger cities could provide a good basis for tools that could be adopted more widely.

New tools require new procurement skills. At the same time, it must therefore be ensured that the skills of municipal employees are kept up to date.

The result will be a municipality that serves its residents even faster, more reliably and more efficiently and where decisions are still made by people, but with the support of powerful tools.

Municipalities and wellbeing services counties are major buyers and can contribute to the vitality of their regions through their actions. They need services such as property maintenance, cleaning, transport, catering and other support services. By splitting procurement into sufficiently small parts, micro-enterprises and SMEs can also participate in tenders, which will increase the number of bids and thus improve competition, which in turn will improve cost-effectiveness. Smaller procurement packages will also encourage more local businesses to participate in procurement, which will help increase the vitality of the region.

It is also important that municipalities use approaches in competitive tendering that develop the market in the sectors of procurement. These approaches must offer the opportunity to discover and introduce new innovations that enhance municipal activities while providing references for internationalising growth companies. This should be facilitated by a clear focus on innovation in procurement, so that price does not become the decisive factor in procurement decisions.

The market power of municipalities should be taken into account in competitive tendering. Municipalities should use tendering models that strengthen the market in the sector and maintain healthy business activity in the sector. Successful procurement requires better procurement skills in municipalities, so that tendering does not create or maintain monopolies or oligopolies and thus weaken the market and the sector’s capacity for renewal.

Public procurement must also broadly consider sustainability criteria, for example in terms of climate friendliness and support for the circular economy. In order to promote innovative and sustainable procurement, municipalities should actively participate in various networks that have been set up around this topic, so that the lessons learned by individual municipalities and procurement can be shared more widely.

A major part of the future of our cities lies in international technology experts, who now face strict time limits on their unemployment due to the proposed 3-/6-month rule. Their time cannot be wasted waiting for ill-fitting unemployment services; these must be available on the same day. In addition, services must be well suited to highly educated internationals, taking into consideration that the fastest job to find may not be the one most suited to their skills. 

This rule also places internationals at a higher risk of exploitation by lessening their negotiation power to say no to unsafe conditions or taking part in illegal activity. Services to educate on labour rights and on noticing and reacting to exploitation must be in place to combat this. 

The language barrier is the largest hinderance to relevant employment. Native language courses and organized language practice at all levels need to be available with schedules that suit working professionals. The focus should also not only be on the international expert, with subsidized courses available if companies allow staff to participate during working hours. Training must be accessible for companies wishing to internationalise.

This barrier also impacts community participation. The language and cultural barrier to local politics should also be lowered via language policy changes and the smart use of AI in translation. This allows cities to benefit from non-native experts, and those experts to better influence their communities. 

In all this, it should be remembered that an international expert is often coming to Finland with a family. A plan at the local level is needed to aid family members to find work and education, for example via the ensuring of sufficient English language early education and comprehensive school places. In addition, they must also have the ability to help build inclusive communities and to develop a sense of belonging. University cities must also increase their role in connecting students and companies, to lessen the 40% of technology graduates leaving Finland after one year.

Universities are important builders of vitality in their cities. In addition to creating jobs and an environment for innovation, they attract new young people to study in the municipality every year. The students’ experience of their new municipality of residence influences how they envision their life after graduation and can have a decisive influence on their decision to either stay in their place of study to work or to move elsewhere. The student housing situation in municipalities is a major pull factor for those choosing their place of study, and successful housing experiences during studies help students establish roots in their new home municipality. Ensuring an adequate supply of student housing enables full-time study and thereby supports the important objective of raising educational attainment.

The first contact of international experts with their new home municipality is often the housing during their studies, and this experience influences their desire to stay in Finland after their studies. In order to ensure that the integration process is as smooth as possible, it is important that students arriving in Finland have a realistic picture of the services offered by municipalities. The integration of international students requires close cooperation between municipalities, universities and student housing providers.

The vitality of Finnish municipalities consists of high-quality public services, economic activity and community spirit. One of the most important tasks of a municipality is to provide a fertile business environment for local companies and to enable them to join wider networks. This creates local ecosystems that attract investment and create jobs and prosperity. Employment services that have been transferred to municipalities are a key part of a well-functioning package.

The building of networks in business requires competence. A sufficiently extensive and deep competence cluster enables innovation activities, which in turn fuel business expansion and growth. Cooperation between the municipality, businesses, educational institutions and the third sector creates a sufficient competence base for success. RDI cooperation between higher education institutions and businesses is one concrete form of network-based, value-added cooperation.

Network-based cooperation creates a sense of community, which, in addition to services and infrastructure, is a key factor in improving the attractiveness of a municipality. The services essential for immigration must be in order, in terms of employment, education and other integration. It is easy to attract new residents to a safe and comfortable living environment.

In a country the size of Finland, transport links are essential for municipalities. Smooth mobility allows networks to operate flexibly and ensures accessible services. Digital accessibility also improves the quality of the life of local residents and business activities.

The strengths of the local business sector need to be identified, and municipalities and wellbeing services counties should invest in them. For example, innovations related to health technology help improve both the quality and efficiency of services. It is important to be at the forefront in developing and implementing new technological solutions.

Strengthening the vitality of municipalities requires a holistic approach that takes into account economic, social and environmental aspects. This will create an attractive environment for residents and businesses alike.