Mari Kattilakoski with daugther Emma
In Finland, the promotion of well-being is a much emphasised task of
the municipalities, which is currently under the discussion and
revision. On the one hand, the revision is a part of the wider reform
of services, which transforms the health and social services from
municipalities under the regional administration. On the other hand,
the legislation and the policy programs seek to strengthen the
structures and the focus of the well-being policy. As one example of
ways to strengthen the structures, the renewed legislation now
obligates municipalities to collect and exploit the population
indicators as a basis of planning and the implementation of
well-being policies. The municipalities have to set the aims and
measures that responds to the local conditions and needs which raises
from these local indicators of health and well-being. In addition,
the municipalities are obligated to practice wide-ranging
co-operation with the local actors such as civil society.
As a part of our research project, we have analysed in what ways the
perspectives of place-based policy can be seen or not in the policy
of the promotion of well-being. In one sense, the indicators
represent the place-based perspectives as they produce local,
municipal level information on the health and well-being of the
population. However, the followed indicators are mainly set from
above and are consistent for all municipalities. In this sense, the
indicators give a little space for the variations and the discretion
for the local governance to decide what indicators are the most
substantive for their municipality. In addition, the indicators
represent the state of well-being of the whole population or the
certain population group on the whole municipality. This lead to
information that do not distinguish spatial variations inside the
municipality and easily describe conditions or needs on average. This
seems to be a problem especially in the wide-ranging and diverse
municipalities where the well-being is unevenly distributed
geographically, or the conditions for having access among the
well-being services vary between places – for instance, between the
main municipal centre and villages. In such cases, the
indicator-based information has a tendency to support rather
spatially-blind than place-based policies on municipalities.
Besides the predetermined indicators may miss the locally important
phenomenon and lead to spatially-blind average information, the
indicators give very little information about the qualitative sides
of well-being and the differences of accessibility to the well-being
services, and the locally important resources that promote the
well-being of inhabitants. In order to gain better understanding
about different dimensions of well-being, some of the municipalities
have begun to develop communal and inclusive methods that supplement
the gaps left by the indicators. The idea is to bring together
different perceptions of well-being by gathering experimental
knowledge of inhabitants, and this way formulate place-based
information about the content, needs and communal resources of
well-being, which should be taken into account as a part of the
municipal well-being policies.
Mari Kattilakoski and Maija Halonen, Karelian
Institute, University of Eastern Finland
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