Nationally Led Society Preparedness in Sweden and Finland

Summary: The Nordic nations of Sweden and Finland take a proactive approach in preparing civil society for a range of hazards, such as major accidents, crises, and the consequences of war.1 The work is driven by government initiatives and works to incorporate a broad society-wide focus: Everyone has a role in enhancing societal resilience and preparedness, including citizens, civil society, the public and private sector, and local and central government. Work in multihazard risk assessment, risk management planning, risk communications, exercises and training, and international cooperation has reduced vulnerability and increased preparedness. These examples exemplify Systemic Risk Response (SRR) criteria of Mainstreaming, Individual and Collective Agency, Complexity, and Transformation.

Case Study: Nationally Led Society Preparedness in Sweden and Finland

Sweden has developed a comprehensive societal security approach through the leadership of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), established in 2009 and employing over 1,300 people.2 This transformation was informed and catalyzed by a series of MSB-identified crises, including the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami that killed over 500 Swedish citizens, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the 2015 migrant crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Sweden suffered much higher rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths compared to its Nordic neighbours due to poor civil-/public-/private-sector coordination. These events exposed vulnerabilities in Sweden’s post–Cold War security posture, including fragile just-in-time supply chains and digitized infrastructure susceptible to cyber-attacks.3 Similarly, Finland’s current Comprehensive Security Model (CSM) for national security was formalized in 2003 and emphasizes national preparedness, foresight, and a society-wide approach.4

Sweden and Finland’s “Total Defence” and “Societal Security” strategies, respectively, employ an all-hazards approach that integrates the civil society capabilities to address threats regardless of their origin, whether natural disasters, accidents, or deliberate attacks.5 In Sweden, the MSB coordinates preparedness across all sectors and government levels, aiming to ensure that society can function for three months in the event of a crisis that diverts government resources and attention. This model emphasizes that every citizen, organization, and sector has a role in building resilience, with regular initiatives like National Preparedness Week encouraging household self-sufficiency for at least one week.6 In Finland, the comprehensive security strategy is overseen by the Ministry of Defence, alongside close coordination with other national ministries, including the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Ministry of Education, and others.

Highlights in Systemic Risk Response

A systemic risk response encompasses any action that mitigates, prepares for, adapts to, and transforms away from the harms of systemic risks. These nationally led approaches illustrate how the integration of civil society’s differentiated roles and capabilities can strengthen national crisis response and preparedness.

Mainstreaming

MSB’s comprehensive training and exercise framework exemplifies the transition from specialized, siloed approaches to mainstreamed multihazard risk assessment and response capabilities across societal sectors. MSB provides training and exercises for organizations, public authorities, and individuals at both a national and an international level, with the objective of ensuring that societal actors are prepared to handle an emergency as well as manage and mitigate its consequences.7 This approach moves beyond proprietary expertise by offering customized courses in emergency prevention, crisis management, hazardous substances, fire prevention, and rescue for 4,000 local and state authorities and private individuals each year. MSB employs a range of teaching methods, including lectures, individual assignments, group discussions, practical exercises, seminars, role-play, films, and interviews. These training courses help participants develop cross-cutting cooperation and problem-solving skills and illustrate how the agency mainstreams systemic risk assessment by breaking down traditional disciplinary silos and creating integrated capacity development pathways.

Similarly, in Finland, protecting vital societal functions is a shared responsibility involving every part of society. Public authorities, businesses, and civil society form interconnected networks that follow common principles and work across multiple layers of society. Security is reinforced through the exchange of information and aligned objectives. Communication is multilingual, multichannel, and fact-based, designed to foster trust, inclusion, and public confidence in the future.8

Individual & Collective Agency

Sweden’s MSB exemplifies comprehensive capacity-building for individual and collective agency through its multilayered approach that facilitates society-wide participation in crisis preparedness. At the individual level, the agency empowers citizens through transparent communication campaigns, distributing the “In case of crisis or war” pamphlet to every household, maintaining dedicated websites, and organizing National Preparedness Week to build practical skills and household self-sufficiency.9

Collective agency is fostered through 19 voluntary civil defence organizations that provide structured opportunities for public participation in first-aid training and emergency response activities, which the government considers “an important part of society’s crisis preparedness.”10 The MSB facilitates systematic communication between all stakeholders, including individuals, non-profit organizations, faith communities, individuals, associations, the culture sector, municipalities, the private sector, and the national government. This is done by clearly delineating responsibilities and coordinating large-scale Total Defense exercises that involve parliament, government agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and the general public. Critically, they are also maintaining dual civilian-wartime roles that integrate everyday functions with crisis response.11

This comprehensive approach transforms traditional top-down emergency management into a participatory system where every citizen, organization, and sector understands their role and actively contributes to societal resilience, creating a robust foundation for systems transformation through shared responsibility and coordinated action.

In Finland, preparedness guides empower citizens with concrete steps for surviving wartime and other crises, stressing self-sufficiency, resilience, and stockpiling essentials. This individual readiness complements collective efforts such as widespread public participation in defence training, strong national support for defending the country (with 80% of the population supporting conscription efforts), and community engagement by the government to communicate risks. Educational initiatives, including the National Defence Course, foster cooperation across government, industry, and community leaders, ensuring that both personal initiative and coordinated action contribute to national resilience.12

Complexity

MSB demonstrates an understanding of intersystemic risks that transcend individual system boundaries through its comprehensive risk communication efforts. The agency’s crisis preparedness brochure distributed to every Swedish household explicitly acknowledges how disruptions cascade across interconnected systems, warning that “incidents in the rest of the world may result in shortages of certain foodstuffs” and “disruptions to important IT systems may have an impact on the electricity supply,” illustrating how failures in one system rapidly propagate to disrupt multiple others, including heating, food storage, transportation, financial services, communications, and healthcare.13 This inter-systemic perspective is further exemplified in MSB’s “Five Challenging Future Scenarios for Societal Security” report, which examines cross-cutting risks spanning politics, economy, population, information and communication, climate, and technology across 13 underlying dimensions to analyze how scenarios such as “accelerating climate change and rising oil prices” or “antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread across the world” create cascading effects that transcend sectoral boundaries.14

Finland notes that “Due to the diversity of threats and the complexity of situations, it is not always possible to prepare for each situation separately. The emphasis is therefore on general resilience built through long-term preparedness. This resilience enables the ability to cope with unexpected situations and act flexibly and effectively even in unforeseen circumstances.”15

Transformation

Sweden’s MSB was born out of a search for knowledge and direction following the Cold War, and today, its society-wide preparedness approach demonstrates transformative potential that extends far beyond traditional emergency management. MSB is ambitious in its goal of reshaping Sweden’s societal security infrastructure to address escalating contemporary risks. As a leading contingency agency actively pushing for preparedness in the EU and globally, MSB aims to build resilience across social, knowledge, and physical dimensions, creating a platform that can accelerate deeper transformational responses while fostering social cohesion through engagement across all scales and segments of society.16

This systemic transformation is evidenced by measurable changes in national preparedness capacity, with household emergency self-sufficiency capabilities improving from 26% of households in 2021 to 37% a year later.17 MSB has also seen widespread participation in their annual Preparedness Week. Preparedness Week is a nationwide campaign in Sweden, initiated in 2017, to encourage individuals to strengthen their own crisis readiness and manage without society support for at least a week. Held annually in week 39, it brings together authorities, municipalities, businesses, and civil society to emphasize that personal preparedness is a vital part of Sweden’s collective resilience. Each year highlights a specific theme, such as food, democracy, or practical exercises, to make preparedness relevant in people’s everyday lives, representing a paradigm shift from reactive crisis management to proactive, distributed resilience-building.18

Finland has also seen marked transformation, as demonstrated by their network of dual-function shelter infrastructures. Since 1915, Finland has developed civilian shelters to protect against wartime dangers, initially using reinforced cellars and later reinforced concrete structures from the 1950s onward. Over time, legislation expanded shelter classifications to meet varying needs, with more robust designs for large populations or critical assets. Once concentrated in major urban and industrial areas, shelters began appearing nationwide after legal reforms in the 1990s, requiring certain new buildings to include proportional protection spaces. Today, government-trained designated caretakers maintain roughly 45,000 civil defence shelters, providing space for around 3.6 million people, though not all are intended for simultaneous use, as many citizens would maintain essential societal functions, such as healthcare workers, military, police, etc. While Cold War policies emphasized mass civilian protection, current strategies focus more on safeguarding vital societal operations, with population protection as one important component.19 In peacetime, the civil defence shelters often serve as parking garages, sports venues, or storage spaces.20

Key Insights and Lessons Learned

These society-wide preparedness approaches integrate Systemic Risk Response (SRR) criteria related to Mainstreaming, Individual and Collective Agency, Complexity, and Transformation. Several key insights important to designing and implementing nationally led preparedness efforts include:

1. Communicate with transparency: Maintain openness and transparency about the complex and often unknown nature of the diverse risks facing society, acknowledging uncertainty while providing clear guidance, rather than creating false assurances about predictable threats. Preparedness discourse should be reframed positively as part of improving the quality of life, rather than disaster-focused.
2. Define citizen engagement roles and responsibilities: Employ calm, open, and clear communications with citizens that explicitly recognize the valuable contributions a society-wide approach can provide, while clearly outlining government expectations and the differentiated responsibilities expected from various citizen groups and sectors. As a direct result of these policies and preparedness activities, Sweden and Finland’s governmental ambitions and actual capacities for engaging civil society significantly exceed those of their European neighbours.
3. Implement preparedness activities regularly: Awareness alone does not lead to preparedness: Although citizens are more aware of what actions they need to take, research recommends implementing preparedness activities, such as maintaining emergency supplies, on a regular basis for everyday situations like illness or minor disruptions, rather than only for catastrophic events. Silos persist within crisis preparedness systems; bridging gaps is essential as society becomes more diverse, particularly ensuring minorities and small language groups receive preparedness information (e.g., COVID-19 highlighted communication failures with cultural minorities).
4. Recognize and enable contributions from all civil society actors: Finland supports a number of programs promoting social, cultural, and psychological needs alongside practical preparedness, such as plans for the potential relocation of cultural assets, support for religious communities,and maintaining youth work, civic sporting activities, and voluntary initiatives during disruptions.

1 “Why Nordic countries are crisis readiness role models,” accessed September 18, 2025,/www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2024/11/20/why-nordic-countries-are-crisis-readiness-role-models-for-executives/.

2 Livia Dewaele and Rebecca Lucas, “Policymaking to support resilience in democratic countries: An examination of Sweden, Israel, and Australia,” European Journal of Futures Research 10, no. 13 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00200-y.

3 Bengt Sundelius and Jan Eldeblad, “Societal security and total defense: The Swedish way,” National Defense University Press, March 10, 2023, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3323928/societal-security-and-total-defense-the-swedish-way/; Dewaele and Lucas, “Policymaking to support resilience in democratic countries.”

4 Marc Ablong, “Building national preparedness: A road map for Australia and what we should learn from Finland,” ASPI, May 22, 2025, www.aspi.org.au/report/building-national-preparedness-a-road-map-for-australia-and-what-we-should-learn-from-finland/.

5 Sundelius and Eldeblad, “Societal security and total defense”; Ablong, “Building national preparedness.”

6 “Beredskapsveckan,” accessed September 18, 2025, www.msb.se/sv/amnesomraden/krisberedskap--

civilt-forsvar/risk--och-kriskommunikation/beredskapsveckan/ ; Sundelius and Eldeblad, “Societal security and total defense”; Dewaele and Lucas, “Policymaking to support resilience in democratic countries.”

7 “MSB College Revinge and Sandö,” accessed September 18, 2025, www.msb.se/en/training--exercises/msb-college/.

8 Security Committee, “Security strategy for society: Government resolution” (Finnish Government, 2025), https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/166026/VN_2025_3.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y.

9 Dewaele and Lucas, “Policymaking to Support Resilience in Democratic Countries”; “Beredskapsveckan.”

10 Dewaele and Lucas, “Policymaking to Support Resilience in Democratic Countries.”

11 Dewaele and Lucas, “Policymaking to Support Resilience in Democratic Countries.”

12 Ablong, “Building National Preparedness.”

13 “Advice for individuals,” accessed September 18, 2025, www.msb.se/en/advice-for-individuals/.

14 Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, Five Challenging Future Scenarios for Societal Security (2013), www.msb.se/siteassets/dokument/publikationer/english-publications/five-challenging-future-scenarios-for-societal-security.pdf.

15 Security Committee, “Security strategy for society.”

16 “Vårt Uppdrag,” accessed September 18, 2025, www.msb.se/sv/om-msb/vart-uppdrag/.

17 kennedyoutdoor, “Sweden’s preparedness week: A time to practice crisis readiness,” Nordisk Prepper,

September 22, 2024, https://nordiskprepper.com/swedens-preparedness-week-2024/.

18 “Beredskapsveckan.”

19 Pasi Nuutinen, “Over 100 years of Finnish expertise in civil protection: From shelters to total preparedness,” Jensen Hughes Europe, January 5, 2023,

www.jensenhughes.com/europe/insights/over-100-years-of-finnish-expertise-in-civil-protection-from-shelters-to-total-preparedness.

20 Ablong, “Building national preparedness.”

21 Security Committee, “Security strategy for society.”

22 Camille Lin, “‘The Sámi want to be part of the defense value chain, so to speak,” Polar Journal, June 12,

2025, https://polarjournal.net/the-sami-want-to-be-part-of-the-defense-value-chain-so-to-speak/.

23 Jessica Gustafsson, “‘Preparedness should be integrated into everyday life,’” Hanken, January 29,

2025, www.hanken.fi/en/news/preparedness-should-be-integrated-everyday-life.