In recent years, in the wake of repeated systemic crises and growing uncertainty, “the future” has become increasingly important worldwide, both in public discourse and in socio-political academia. Yet the defining characteristic of “the future” is first, that it does not exist and, second, that it is highly complex, presenting never-ending clusters of options, particularly for today’s networked societies. Perhaps even more than other objects of knowledge and action, “the future” requires a systemic and holistic approach—inter- and transdisciplinary—to its cognitive and creative management in the threefold tension between planning, foresight and anticipation.
Over the past few years, many attempts at complexity-adequate strategic outlooks on the pan-European level have been undertaken, from the annual EU Forward Look Reports to the more recent EU Foresight Report series. These and several strategic futures efforts in European countries have gained a high reputation for their anticipatory achievements and networked modernisation, such as those in Latvia or Italy.
At the same time, the European community faces an essentially “neocybernetic” challenge posed by “the future” at the intersection of the global and the local—the “glocal”. This means there are areas for improvement of existing approaches, particularly in the encompassing perspective of interfaces and overlaps. A characteristic of the present is that both components of the European “glocal”—the local and the global—are changing faster and more profoundly than previously, yet without significant mutual alignment. This misalignment is one origin of the surge of populism and new European nationalisms.
Here lies the problem of the EU’s past attempts towards futures governance. Most European strategy papers on the possibilities of futures governance, let alone on anticipatory innovation governance (AIG) as proposed by the OECD and the WEF, or on futures literacy, as proposed by UNESCO’s Futures Literacy and Foresight (FLF) programme as part of its greater Management of Social Transformations (MOST) agenda, have so far been rather secluded from international cooperation. This is due not least to an almost ideological insistence on “values” which might be self-evident to Europeans but are not always shared by other global players.
Furthermore, many of the EU’s foresight and anticipation programmes have focused predominantly on sectoral or specialised areas of development, and mostly so within the framework of known trajectories. Alternative models or internationally discussed innovative concepts of the future—including the improbable, the unexpected and the unknown—have found less attention in a European Union inclined almost stubbornly to normativity, anticipative control and security, rather than to free-wheeling experimental innovation or charting unknown territory.
As a result, there has been little networking with global future forums that are currently in the spotlight and creating international momentum, such as Dubai or Saudi Arabia. More critically, there has been a lack of practical training programmes in applied future skills for politicians, economic decision-makers and social designers.
Yet because social conflicts about the future are increasing, futures are becoming more and more part of social negotiation processes and are more frequently marked by ruptures. Therefore, a comprehensive, long-term commitment to “futures governance” that actively extends beyond legislative periods is at the order of the day for a European Union that wants to stay on track with fast-advancing global regions. In order to stay at the forefront, Europe now must give up its seclusion and foster new partnerships beyond political and social systems, ideally with the proverbial “improbable partners”. Improbable partners are the best, even if they are ideologically misaligned, because the future itself features improbability at its core.
With the help of available scientific knowledge, Europe now needs an encompassing, beyond-its-borders project on “futures governance” able to steer the continent into the unknown. At the same time, this project must mediate between the futures interests of the EU as a whole and its individual regional members and territories. Such a project, situated for example in the European Commission’s Science Hub or, more probably even more fertile, in its Centre for Advanced Studies which has been founded appropriately for such purpose, must in essence develop a coordinated, innovative and internationally, trans-systemically highly networked concept for the inter- and transdisciplinary governance of futures, in Europe and beyond.
The direction of the project must reach beyond Europe because the future cannot be restricted to one system or continent, and will be the more fruitful, the more globally it is approached. A new EU “futures governance” project would ideally be of equal size to its recent Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Flagship project, the “Human Brain Project” (2013–2023). It must provide a sound basis for politics, business and society to strengthen Europe’s futures viability and thus ensure sustainable and resilient development in the long term. The aim in the first place should be to intensify international cooperation, particularly with non-European regions that have experience in future management, in order to develop instruments that can be adapted to the continent and made fruitful contributions to its specific requirements.
In order to establish a scientific basis for this endeavour, the project should build on related previous successful projects such as the AIG (Anticipatory Innovation Governance) approach of the OECD and the UNESCO Futures Literacy and Foresight Programme (FLF), which may provide valuable experience to the project. In addition to the work on practical futures research and education, public awareness and cooperation between science and public administrations, the EU “futures governance” project should concentrate on the practical implementation of institutional building blocks based on proven best practices from other actors, which must be adapted or newly created in Europe in cooperation with national, regional and local stakeholders.
Possible options include, but are not limited to:
- Establishment of a Committee for the Future in the European Parliament (oriented towards the model in the Finnish parliament)
- Creation of a Futures Coordination Office in the European Commission (oriented towards the Swedish and Finnish models)
- Publication of a periodic Futures Report by the European Union’s authorities in cooperation with all the relevant EU departments, launched asymmetrically to legislative periods (oriented towards the Finnish model)
- Six-month part-time training in futures skills for EU high-level administrative staff and politicians (oriented towards the model used in Dubai)
- Establishment of an EU Futures Council (oriented towards the models used in the more than 30 Futures Councils of the World Economic Forum)
- Establishment of yearly decentralised Futures Days as public participation forums for the population (oriented towards the model used in Scandinavian countries)
- Establishment of an academic cluster-based Competence Centre for Futures (in the more basic and encompassing sense, beyond the announced specialised programme on new EU Digital Skills Academies)
- Implementation and strengthening of futures studies at all EU universities as part of the Studium Generale, or of existing traditional study programmes (following the example of the Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku University in Finland, or the College of Global Futures of Arizona State University)
Overall, the “futures governance” project of the European Union should be conceived long-term and cover the time period until 2030 first, and then to 2050 in a second stage. It should involve, perhaps in circling responsibilities, all EU member states and their academic institutions, and it should place emphasis on the cooperative and application-oriented development and consolidation of a transnational cluster of institutionalised critical future studies, conceived perhaps in the framework of a newly developed node within existing programmes such as ERASMUS+, as cluster studies providing “cotutelle” or joint degrees as a principle from the very start. These studies should be conceived as self-critical, flexible, reactive to new developments and actively related to sustainability issues, in order to better integrate the pillars of sustainability and “futures”—which should not be identified with or reduced to each other, as occurred for a certain period of time particularly in the German-speaking countries.
The third task should consist in increasing systemic multi-resilience through futures competence. If the EU manages to practically materialise such a rational yet bold approach and invests sufficient money and manpower in it to improve its own standing in the growingly important global “futures” realm, and if it at the same time intensifies open-minded cooperation appropriate to the non-determinacy of the future—without lecturing other world regions but trying to develop as much as possible shared basic values regarding expected, probable, possible or desirable futures on the ground of a minimal common denominator of ethics—the EU can make good progress in a field which it has far too long institutionally, politically and ideologically neglected.
Roland Benedikter, author or editor of 20 books, holds the UNESCO Chair in Interdisciplinary Anticipation and Global-Local Transformation at the Center for Advanced Studies of Eurac Research in Bolzano and is a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
