Prof. Dr. Tero Erkkilä – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Tero Erkkilä

University of Helsinki
Political science

External Senior Fellow
März 2022 – Juli 2022

Last Update: 31.08.2022

Curriculum Vitae

Tero Erkkilä is Professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki (see CV). His research interests include transnational governance, public institutions, and collective identities. His previous book publications include Government Transparency (Palgrave 2012), Global University Rankings (Palgrave 2013), Public Administration (Routledge 2015, together with B. Guy Peters and Patrick von Maravic), Rankings and Global Knowledge Governance (Palgrave 2018, with Ossi Piironen) and Ombudsman as a Global Institution (Palgrave 2020). He has also published in various peer reviewed journals and acted as a co-editor of two journal special issues. His previous research project Policy Instruments and Global Governance: Concepts and Numbers analyzed numerical governance by global rankings and policy indicators. He is currently involved in an Academy of Finland funded research consortium Just Recovery from Covid-19? Fundamental Rights, Legitimate Governance and Lessons Learnt (JuRe), where he is leading a subproject on Openness and Legal Oversight (WP3).

Selected Publications

Erkkilä, Tero (2020) Ombudsman as a Global Institution – Transnational Governance and Ideational Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Erkkilä, Tero and Ossi Piironen (2018) Rankings and Global Knowledge Governance – Higher Education, Innovation and Competitiveness. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Peters, Guy B., Erkkilä Tero, von Maravic Patrick (2015) Public Administration. Research Strategies, Concepts and Methods. Routledge, London.
Erkkilä, Tero, editor (2013). Global University Rankings: Challenges for European Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Erkkilä, Tero (2012) Government Transparency: Impacts and Unintended Consequences. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

FRIAS Project

Just Recovery from Covid-19 (JuRe)? Openness and Legal Oversight

My FRIAS project is linked to a broader JuRe research consortium that explores how the political, legal and administrative systems in Finland, and throughout Europe, can assure that the post-pandemic recovery proceeds in a fair manner. My project tracks the challenges of openness and legal oversight as well as institutional recovery. Nordic countries have long legal and institutional traditions in openness, i.e. access to government information and broad-based decision-making. However, these practices have been severed by the Covid-19 crisis as the information base for making decisions has often been scarce and accessible only to a limited number of actors. The problems of knowledge asymmetries and narrowed participation are even more pronounced in European multi-level governance, apparent in Finnish debates on the current crisis. A major challenge to openness during the pandemic has been access to scientific information as well as the underlying data and models.

Parallel to the challenges of openness, my project assesses the role of legal overseers in legitimating and controlling the government activities. The workload of the Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice has increased significantly during the pandemic and their work has become politicised, causing potential tensions for their position as independent institutions. My project explores institutional strategies for democratic sustainability through post-pandemic institutional recovery and recalibration, seeing crises as opportunities for raising public awareness of the legal overseers and information rights.