Climbing the Ladder Toward Security: Co-Creating a Safer Finland

As disaster responses become more complex, there is a greater need to coordinate the activities of public authorities with business operators, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and citizen volunteers. To achieve the goal of improving disaster response, we recommend a process of “co-creation” where each of these groups is involved in planning disaster responses, and the roles of each group are clearly defined. This approach allows public authorities to take advantage of the experiences, resources, and ideas of these diverse groups. In turn, it allows groups outside of traditional government response structures the opportunity to contribute. The approach described here is being taken in Finland where it has been used to develop a comprehensive Security Strategy for Society (The Security Committee 2017). In response to this new approach, we organized eight regional forums involving a total of 188 people from the public sector and NGOs to discuss how co-creation occurs in planning safety and security functions and to discover what challenges are not being met.