How debt crises are managed, who manages them, and what that costs the people living through them.
I study how debt crises are governed, who governs them, and what their management means for the people living through them. This work spans the governance of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the politics of the European debt crisis, and the wider architecture of development finance and international economic governance that determines how much policy space governments retain. My current work with Teppo Eskelinen examines how debt crises enable policy ideas to travel across historical periods and national settings. Our forthcoming working paper is titled “Policy Script Portals: How Debt Crises Propel Ideas Across Time and Space.” Earlier work:
- Project: Tackling Biases and Bubbles in Participation (Strategic Research Council, 2017–2022). The Work Package I led in this consortium resulted in the article Policy Coherence across Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals: Lessons from Finland, co-authored with Anna Salmivaara and published in Development Policy Review in 2021. The article examined Finland’s efforts to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals across government, identifying persistent administrative silos, the selective use of SDG targets, and tensions among economic, social, and environmental priorities. The underlying evaluation received the Finnish Evaluation Society’s annual award for an important policy evaluation in 2019.
- Kehityspolitiikan globaalin toimintaympäristön keskeiset muutokset 2019–2023 [Key Changes in the Global Operating Environment of Development Policy, 2019–2023] (with Eija Ranta and Anniina Urvas, 2023). Commissioned by Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, this report assessed how the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, intensifying geopolitical competition, democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space, changes in development finance, and the climate and biodiversity crises had reshaped the operating environment of development policy.
- Policy Diffusion within International Organizations: A Bottom-Up Analysis of International Monetary Fund Tax Work in Panama, Seychelles, and the Netherlands (UNU-WIDER Working Paper, 2017). This study examined how policy ideas travel through country-level technical work within a single international organisation, focusing on the IMF’s tax-related policy advice to three countries known for their roles in international tax planning and, in some cases, tax evasion: Panama, Seychelles, and the Netherlands. It documented how the IMF became increasingly critical of Panama’s financial-secrecy and tax practices, particularly following the Panama Papers leak, while its criticism of Seychelles also intensified. The Netherlands’ tax policies, by contrast, received more lenient treatment.
- My Finnish-language textbook (2011) on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund remains a rare comprehensive treatment of these institutions in my native language. The book examines their central roles in the global economy, longstanding criticisms of their governance and lending practices, and the social and human consequences of the policies attached to their financing.
- Similarly, my Finnish-language book on the European debt crisis (2015, with Mikko Remes) examined the origins, management, and political consequences of the eurozone debt crisis. It situated the eurozone crisis within a longer history of sovereign-debt crises, beginning with the settlement of Germany’s debts following the First and Second World Wars. The book also examined the human consequences of debt crises and presented more sustainable alternatives for governing sovereign debt.
- Practice: I am a former member of Finland’s Parliamentary Development Policy Committee. Earlier, as an advocacy officer in a civil society organization, I participated in Eurodad’s European advocacy networks on tax justice, sovereign debt, and international financial institutions. This work included organising a Eurodad meeting in Helsinki, participating in civil-society meetings with World Bank and IMF Executive Directors, and representing Finnish civil society as a member of Finland’s official delegations to the 2008 Doha Review Conference on Financing for Development and the 2009 United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development in New York.