I was an intern at Akordi, a small not for profit company in Finland starting from February to May in 2022. At the beginning, it was almost overwhelming how Akordi is involved in such a wide variety of different types and levels of processes; multi-party negotiations, national-level policy development, intra-organizational interventions, writing handbooks on how […]
Today Akordi hosted a group of students from Virginia Tech Leadership in Global Sustainability program. The visit was part of their excursion to Finland to learn about Nordic transfomations. Akordi founders Jonna Kangasoja and Lasse Peltonen shared the origin story of the not-for-profit company and the research based foundations for Mutual Gains Approach Akordi is using in […]
by Jonna Kangasoja I was invited to speak at the NELIS (Next Leaders’ Initiative for Sustainability) Europe Summit 2019 in Helsinki last week. The request was to share some key lessons on leading through conflict. Any wisdom I have, I have learned from my wise teachers, both the official ones (e.g. Robert R. Stains, Steve […]
Environmental disasters can become important events in our individual lives and in the collective memory of a nation. Even eras can be named after them as we may refer to a time before and after the Chernobyl accident. At some point of our lives, almost all of us can expect to be directly or indirectly […]
The Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia and The Finnish Environment Institute together with Akordi assembeled a citizen jury to discuss the use of marshlands as a part of preparing the Regional Plan of South Ostrobothnia. The aim of the proposed plan is to integrate the interests of peat production, conservation and other marshland usages. The […]
We asked Akordi mentor, professor Lawrence Susskind, founder of the the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, “What do we know about environmental dispute resolution?”. He offered the following list of fifteen things we know – for an actual fact. The still timely list was Originally published on Consensus Building Approach, “Fifteen Things We Know About Environmental Dispute Resolution” […]
In the aftermath of an environmental or other type of disaster, we often find out that someone or some faction had already given a pre-emptive warning about the looming crisis. An outrage follows: who screwed up, why were these warnings ignored and why was no preventive action taken? It brings up a valid question: why […]
Winning and being a winner are two very different things when it comes to interest based negotiation. During a one week course in Joensuu about Environmental Collaboration and Conflict Resolution this distinction was elaborated with an exercise that can be used in recognizing three important factors in successful negotiation. In August 2018 NOVA University Network organized together […]
The city of Jyväskylä has finalised its first strategic Forest Programme. The consensus building process facilitated by Akordi had five different phases: 1) stakeholder assessment, 2) defining the process and its goals, 3) joint fact-finding, 4) finding and discussing the solutions and 5) compacting the programme. The sixth phase will be implementation and evaluation phase. The process […]