Beyond effectiveness: the uses of Finland’s national programme to promote sustainable consumption and production

Abstract The scope and cross-disciplinary nature of challenges related to sustainable consumption and production (SCP) have led to calls to develop national SCP programmes. This article analyses and evaluates one of the pioneers in the field, the Finnish programme to promote SCP. However, traditional evaluation approaches that are centred on effectiveness are blind to the successful features of the programme process, thus providing an obscure picture of the project. To develop an alternative approach that would depict the variety of uses that the programme process has enabled, we turn to knowledge-for-action and particularly knowledge use theories. From this perspective, we track five different use categories from the Finnish SCP process: scripted, deliberative, political, ritual and unprompted. From the use perspective, one of the key problems in the process was the discrepancy between the uses that were anticipated by the majority of the committee members and the actual uses that took place. The majority expected scripted use, i.e., implementation of the programme as agreed on by the committee. However, few effects can be directly associated with programme implementation. At the same time, the programme process mainly succeeded in its deliberative and ritual uses. Also the unprompted uses have turned out to be almost as significant as the scripted ones. The article challenges the leaders, participants and evaluators to rethink broad sustainability programmes from the use perspective. It is important to be transparent about the reasons why these programmes are made and, particularly, to whom and for which uses.