Foresight and long-term policy-making: An analysis of anticipatory boundary work in policy organizations in The Netherlands

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.…”

“…Connecting the long-term planning horizon of foresight with present-day concerns in policy and society often remains a hard thing to do. In this respect, valuable attempts have been made to develop criteria or principles for improving the link between foresight and policy [6][7][8][9]45]: for example, appropriate timing and conveying actionable messages are suggested. When futures practitioners become more responsive to cues in the political and bureaucratic domain, it becomes meaningful and valuable for a policy-maker or a politician to use that knowledge [8].…”

“…[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.…”

“…more relevant issue are addressed [6]) and legitimacy (e.g. by expanding the inclusiveness of diverging values, beliefs and interests [3]) of the knowledge that is produced in foresight processes.…”

“…Engaging with stakeholders can also create problems for futures practitioners, such as a bias to focusing on short-term policy needs (which will impact salience), a lack of scientific underpinning of stakeholder ideas (which has consequences for credibility), issues related to the composition of the stakeholder group (which has impact on legitimacy) [6,11,23]. The challenge for futures practitioners is therefore to ensure that stakeholder participation benefits the salience, credibility and legitimacy of foresight knowledge while it does not compromise one of these qualities in an unacceptable manner.…”