Partnerships against exclusion in a Nordic welfare state

In contrast to the experience of some other European countries, Finland appears as a country where partnerships have not risen to the level of political conciousness and where interest in them has so far appeared mild. ¹ Only a few years ago even the notion ‘partnership’ was unfamiliar and not in common use. Thus not surprisingly, at the time of our study on partnerships in 1996 (Heikkila and Kautto 1997), Finland had not introduced any national policy programmes that would promote partnership-type responses to exclusion, as had been done for instance in the UK and Ireland. In short, partnerships were neither recognised nor promoted at the national level. Yet there were local initiatives – although not referred to as ‘partnerships’ by their initiators and actors involved – that could well be distinguished as partnerships, if understood broadly as organised cooperation uniting local forces around a common agenda. However, these weak signs of local activity were not suggesting a breakthrough in the spread of partnerships, and so the key conclusion of the study was that partnerships were a marginal phenomenon in Finland.