Barriers and levers to future exploration in practice experiences in policy-making

The reflective futures practitioner: Balancing salience, credibility and legitimacy in generating foresight knowledge with stakeholders

“…Policy-makers perceive foresight knowledge to be of limited use in their daily practices due to a lack of connectivity to the political or organizational logics of policy-making [6,8,9]. Connecting the long-term planning horizon of foresight with present-day concerns in policy and society often remains a hard thing to do.…”

“…[2,[4][5][6][7][8]), challenges are experienced in practice by those involved in foresight studies. Foresight researchers seem to lack sensitivity to particular concerns of politicians and policy-makers [6,8,9], to struggle with the positioning of presentday policy framings in their studies [2], to have difficulties in ensuring a diversity of perspectives for building rich narratives of the future [3,10], and to experience problems in reconciling different and sometimes conflicting ideas and knowledge claims for creating plausible and practical scenarios [4,11]. Accordingly, futures practitioners often fail to generate effective foresight knowledge for policy.…”

Beyond use: Evaluating foresight that fits

“…Over the past decades, there has been an increase in futures studies and in attention for the future in The Netherlands, both in political debate and in the working practices of policy makers, and at all levels of government; state, province, municipality [2][3][4]. Furthermore, executive agencies are engaged in foresight activities as well [5,6].…”

“…Much FS is done, but what are policy makers doing with all that? [4][5][6][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. 1 The literature suggests that the future remains a secondary argument in decision making, in the shadow of short-term arguments.…”

“…Still, although there is more and probably 'better' knowledge about the future then ever before [2,3,4,8] knowledge about the future is hardly used in policy making. Or it is used primarily to support choices made for other reasons and/or based on other knowledge.…”