Foresight and scenario building

Foresight has been defined as a systematic, participatory, future intelligence gathering and medium-to-long-term vision-building process aimed at present-day decisions and mobilising joint actions. Thus, Foresight is a prospective approach that incorporates a participatory approach. The use of foresight techniques has the potential to improve regional and global cooperation policies, as well as their consequences. More indirect effects of Foresight include better informed decisions, generation of broader a consensus, promotion of strategic and long-term thinking, and the accumulation of policy-relevant knowledge. Foresight is increasingly used in the context of governance, and EU-GRASP wants to apply the existing expertise of some of the partners to security governance. The purpose of these exercises will be on the one hand, to examine the key driving forces that influence future developments in multilateral security governance, and on the other hand, to increase the involvement of various stakeholders, including the citizens.

EU-GRASP will run a number of scenario-building exercises from a participative perspective. The idea is to explore possible future EU policies regarding different security issues, and according to the different forms of multilateral cooperation as a variation of key policy choices regarding Sustainable Development and global governance. The participatory methods of Foresight exercises are interactive tools for engaging stakeholders in these processes, whereby the relevant actors can vary with the specific issue being addressed. In this case, EU-GRASP intends to involve EU officials, Member state officials, academia, civil society representatives, NGOs working in the studied security fields and other international organisation’s officials.