International Seminar on Governmental Foresight: why is Foresight important to face the challenges of the future?
On Friday 10 May of 2024, the Center for Contemporary Studies (CETC) and CIDOB organized together in Barcelona an International Seminar of Governmental Foresight with the objective of reflecting about how foresight can be incorporated into policy definition in order to anticipate great challenges and improve the policy making decisions.
Through three round tables with the participation of experts, technicians and political leaders, the seminar allowed to analyse the utility and the challenges of foresight in the government field. This summary intends to collect the central subjects that were treated in the seminar and the debates that at present take place in this discipline, every time more relevant in the political sphere. The seminar also had the collaboration of the European Commission’s Regional Office in Barcelona.
The first round table on the motivations and the objectives to incorporate the strategic foresight in the governmental area counted with the participation of Frederik Matthys, Head of Policies and Networks at the OECD; Anne-Katrin Bock, Head of the Competence Centre on Foresight at the Joint Research Center; Francesc Claret, Head of the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia to the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Susanne Giesecke, Senior Researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT).
The second round table, focused on reflecting about how foresight can influence on the orientation and definition of public policies, had as a main speakers Diego Rubio, Secretary-General of Public Policy, European Affairs and Strategic Foresight of the Government of Spain; Philine Warnke, Team Leader at the Foresight for Policy and Administration unit from the Competence Center Foresight; Grzegorz Drozd, Deputy Head of unit for Foresight and Strategic Communication at the European Commission, and Henning Riecke, Director of Strategic Foresight at the Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik-BAKS.
Finally, the third round table was focused on sharing several applied foresight experiences and practices in different institutions, with the participation of Timo-Topias Totti Könnölä, CEO at the Insight Foresight Institute; Peter De Smedt, Director of Strategic Insights and Analyses at the Flanders Chancellery and Foreign Office; Marc Rotllan, Head of the prospective, planning and energy regulation programme at the Catalan Energy Institute, and Jordi Torrent, Head of Strategy at Port of Barcelona.
Anticipating stages of future
In spite of being a relatively new activity in the political area, there is a shared vision about the function and the basis that supports foresight and place it every time more in the centrality of the political reflection. Following historical data, and considering the current reality, the studies of prospection identify possible threats and opportunities –taking into account the technological evolution, the impact of the climatic change, the geopolitical conflicts and the social and economic trends– to imagine possible future scenarios. Anticipate possible future realities allow foresight experts to define recommendations and proactive proposals in order to help current politicians to define the necessary public policies that permit to face the challenges of an uncertain tomorrow, with a temporary perspective of short, medium and long term deadlines.
We would find the main value of these prospective studies in their conclusions and recommendations that should serve as an input to design the more pertinent public policies, with proposals directed to intervene and to ensure the political stability and to define a future preferable. Foresight, in this sense, would be considered a political exercise that requires elections; and requires and implies a positioning in relation to decide which society we want to have and to preserve. Because of that, the ethical and moral weight of the consequences of the political proposals that the experts recommend is a relevant responsibility that those who work in this field have to assume.
First panel – Governmental strategic foresight: the reasons why and what for?
Requirements to attain an effective foresight
There is a shared worry as for the best way of introducing the analyses and the conclusions of foresight in the process of designing new policies and to include them in the political agenda. Political responsibles, normally, feel absorbed by urgent subjects and the needs of the daily routine, and they tend to postpone the decisions related with potential threats of an uncertain future. Skills as the negotiation and the capacity to find transversal consensus, as well as to have a huge capacity to influence in the decider politicians, are some of the characteristics that a leader in the area of foresight should have.
It seems there to be a consensus about the idea that the function of foresight, to be effective, has to have a formal structure, a specific funding and a clear and explicit support of those who have the responsibility of implementing relevant change policies. If it is not like this, very probably the analysis and proposals will remain in a theoretical field and will ever not translate into concrete and effective policies.
However, it is in the structure of support to the function of the foresight function where we can find different approaches. In some countries it is in a main unit (even though in the majority of the cases this unit invites agents of several political and social areas to its projects) basically centralized but, in others, the function of foresight distributes in different units more connected to the political cycle and to the daily routine of the political reality. The experts who give support to a more decentralized structure maintain that this allows richer results and an analysis more next to the reality, since it takes different areas of political action into account and incorporate a major diversity of opinions. In any case, there is a consensus as for the fact that the function of foresight has to be led by experts in this field capable of carrying out complex analyses, out of the comfort zone, and promoting disruptive changes and suggesting proactive proposals. They have to be independent units, because they have to have the possibility to challenge the status quo, and they cannot fall in the temptation to be obliging to the politicians.
Second panel – How to incorporate foresight into the orientation and definition of public policies?
To which extent is confidentiality necessary?
In relation to the degree of advertising or confidentiality of the works made in the area of foresight, another controversial subject emerges. It is an accepted opinion that like more agents take part in these studies, in terms of the number of persons invited to contribute to it and the diversity of the profiles of the participants, more complete will be the analysis, and it will also have a major legitimacy. However, the need of space of confidentiality that ensures a transparent analysis and a sincere debate is also claimed, with the possibility to suggest fearless and disruptive proposals (even sometimes maybe hard and unpopular) in relation to the path to follow. In the cases in which it is known that the results will be made public, experts could be fallen in the error of softening part of the analysis and suggested proposals or even to obviate those that would be more advisable if they are controversial, to avoid a negative impact in the public opinion. Despite everything, the publicity of the analysis and the conclusions of the studies of foresight are also seen as a powerful tool to explain certain political decisions that could seem inconvenient to citizens if the motivation by which they are carried out and the basis that sustain them are not explained correctly.
A multidisciplinary task
There is an agreement about the importance that the models of prospection, and the elaboration of future scenarios, support themselves in quantitative data. The availability of historical data is crucial to have a solid basis for building models and to establish reliable relations among the data to elaborate accurate predictive models. In this sense, some experts also defend the importance of including other sciences that bring other kind of considerations and also qualitative contributions, as for example psychology and sociology, that can not be despised if it is wanted to guarantee a complete and exhaustive analysis.
Third panel – Strategic foresight practices
Conclusion
As a conclusion, we can say that foresight studies attempt to anticipate an uncertain future, and that they have to do it by contributing to an objective: the consolidation of stable democracies supported by some common values to preserve. Governments cannot despise the need to integrate activities of prospection into the political cycle. In the current context, in an every time more complex, uncertain and unpredictable world, and in front of speed of changes and the need to have fast and solid answers, governmental foresight has become an important requirement.