No. 17

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The Estonian human development report: prospects for trialogue between scientists, political decision-makers and media

  • Ülo Kaevats

    Professor of Philosophy, Tallinn University of Technology

The Estonian Human Development Report 2007, which has become a kind of a yearbook for Estonian social scientists, is the second report published by the Estonian Cooperation Assembly.

The previous publication – the Estonian Human Development Report – was issued when the publisher still operated under the name of the Public Understanding Foundation. A total of 9 human development reports were issued between 1995 and 2003. With the last two HDRs, similarly to earlier ones, scientists have made a dignified, solid, and utterly reliable contribution to the public dialogue – even a trialogue, if we consider the media – between scientists and political decision-makers. Even though each report separately is a partial representation of the society, due to its inevitable thematic, volume and time restrictions, the succession of reports has given us a kind of an academic view and overview of the Estonian society in 1995–2007 (with gaps in 2003–2005, but these too have been described in later reports). The author hopes that the scientists’ offering will become a permanent and substantial part of the trialogue. As hope alone could prove insufficient, the author advises the Estonian Cooperation Foundation to initiate a seminar series to introduce the Estonian human development reports as study material. For this purpose, the reports must be made easily available. The author also advises to conclude co-operation agreements with media publications in order to institute permanent category headings for responsible discussion over Estonia’s future.

Full article in Estonian

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