Foresight – Using Science and Evidence to Anticipate and Shape the Future
Eckhard Störmer, Laurent Bontoux, Maciej Krzysztofowicz, Florescu Elisabeta, Bock Anne-Katrin, Fabiana Scapolo
Abstract
The role of public policy is to create a desirable future. However, policymaking often suffers from presentism bias, i.e. it focusses on today’s issues and ignores future challenges and opportunities. While the future is uncertain and cannot be predicted, foresight offers a well-established toolbox to help deal with it, in all its uncertainty and complexity. Foresight is a systematic participatory process to create collective intelligence about the medium- to long-term future and provide strategic knowledge for policy making. This chapter presents relevant foresight tools for policymaking: horizon scanning to identify emerging issues, megatrends to understand implications of long-term developments, scenario building to deal with uncertainty and develop a systemic understanding of complex issues, speculative design to illustrate possible future applications, and serious games to experience consequences of possible futures.