The Myanmar Energy and Environment Education (MEEE) project, coordinated by the Finland Futures Research Centre, directly contributes to the development of sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth in Myanmar by enhancing capacities of Myanmar partner institutions to provide quality education on environment and sustainable energy for growing societal and energy sector development needs. Myanmar is currently in a critical time in its energy transition. To be able to attract investors in the renewable energy sector and to re-investigate the government’s RE targets, enhancing access to energy and electrification, as well as reducing CO2 emissions and environmental pollution from fossil fuels there is a dire need for nationally grounded energy expertise.

The objective of Finland's national bioeconomy strategy is to facilitate economic growth and to create new jobs in bioeconomy-based business. Next to technological knowhow and willingness to innovate, firms aspiring to transition to more sustainable materials and technologies need the ability to identify new business opportunities. Courage and commitment to persevere in seizing these uncertain opportunities, and tolerating the uncertainty and the possibility of failure in pursuing them, are equally important. Therefore, the decision to transition to the bioeconomy involves both rational and emotional elements.

Bringing together advanced mobile voice-based technology, service providers and rural people of India in a tailored ecosystem is a unique project both in scale and in approach. Our project – RuralVoice – focuses on the development and deployment of voice-based services in agriculture, healthcare, education, entertainment and banking for the 220 million illiterate and underprivileged Indians that reside in the rural area. In our Indo-Finnish project consortium we are also building sustainable development and inclusive business opportunities for service- and technology companies both in India and in Europe. Keywords: Sustainable development, India, base of the pyramid, frugal innovations, voice-based services, illiterate people, mobile applications, participation, collaboration, localisation

The Internet is one of the most important innovations in today’s ICT domain. It is a tremendous, undisputed force for economic growth and social change (Dalberg Survey Report, 2013). The Internet technology is significantly changing the costs and modes of communication within Africa as well as between Africans and the rest of the world (Foster et al., 2004). This innovation is required to enhance information processing in order to execute applications and deliver services (Mofleh et al., 2008 and Raji et al., 2006). Africans living at home and abroad are experiencing the significant benefits of the Internet as well as its impact on economic development of their countries (Langmia, 2005).

This research project analyses the influence of social movements on primary sector extractive investments. The theory how social movements influence the politics of corporate resource exploitation will be developed and tested through a comparison of empirical evidence from 30 resource exploitation projects in the forest and metal industries of Brazil and India. The research will identify the generalizable and specific mechanisms and political games by which movements transform the local-global political dynamics in areas where increasing transnationalization of resource flows has taken place. Causal process analysis combined with various methods and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 30 cases provides a strategy for working through empirical materials collected by field research. The project belongs to the fields of social scientific environmental research and Political Science/World Politics.