The paper presents recent insights from the ongoing FORLEARN project 1 , which aims to develop Foresight theory and practise by supporting the sharing of experience ("mutual learning") in Europe. Six functions of Foresight for policy-making are elaborated on:1. Informing policy: generating insights regarding the dynamics of change, future challenges and options, along with new ideas, and transmitting them to policy-makers as an input to policy conceptualisation and design.2. Facilitating policy implementation: enhancing the capacity for change within a given policy field by building a common awareness of the current situation and future challenges, as well as new networks and visions amongst stakeholders.3. Embedding participation in policy-making: facilitating the participation of civil society in the policy-making process, thereby improving its transparency and legitimacy.4. Supporting policy definition: jointly translating outcomes from the collective process into specific options for policy definition and implementation.5. Reconfiguring the policy system: in a way that makes it more apt to address long-term challenges.6. Symbolic function: indicating to the public that policy is based on rational information.The relationship between these functions and the tensions that can arise when a Foresight exercise attempts to address more than one function are discussed. Possible approaches for Foresight practice to better achieve the targeted impact on policy-making are outlined and emerging guidelines for improving Foresight practice are presented.
This paper reflects on the potential of future--oriented analysis (FTA) to address major change and to support decision--makers and other stakeholders in anticipating and dealing with transformations. It does so by critically reflecting on the selected papers for this special issue as well as on the discussions that took place at the fourth Seville International Conference on Future--oriented Technology Analysis. Considering the potential roles of FTA in enabling a better understanding of complex situations and in defining effective policy responses leads to the understanding that appropriate FTA practices are needed to enable FTA to fulfil such roles. Dealing with disruptive changes - and grand challenges in particular -, therefore, raises several conceptual, methodological and operational issues. Two of them are general, while further two are specific to the so--called grand challenges: i) distinguish known unknowns, unknown knows and unknown unknowns, ii) combine quantitative and qualitative approaches in a relevant and feasible way, iii) understand the complex and systemic nature of grand challenges, and iv) orchestrate joint responses to grand challenges. After a brief explanation of these issues, the paper outlines the main ideas of the papers published in this special issue. These present various methodological aspects of FTA approaches as well as some advances needed in practice to assist FTA practitioners and stakeholders in comprehending transformations and in tackling the so--called grand challenges.
In this paper, we discuss key issues in harnessing horizon scanning to shape systemic policies, particularly in the light of the foresight exercise 'Facing the future: Time for the EU to meet global challenges' which was carried out for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors. This exercise illustrates how horizon scanning can enable collective sense-making processes which assist in the identification of emerging signals and policy issues; the synthesis of such issues into encompassing clusters; and the interpretation of resulting clusters as an important step towards the coordinated development of joint policy measures. In order to achieve such objectives, horizon scanning can benefit from methods of multi-criteria decision-making and network analysis for prioritizing, clustering and combining issues. Furthermore, these methods provide support for traceability, which in turn contributes to the enhanced transparency and legitimacy of foresight.
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