How Can Foresight Contribute to Building Societal Resilience?

Policy Brief

Foresight processes can help to cope with and make strategic decisions on specific ongoing crises such as climate change, migration or cybersecurity as well as enhance future preparedness. By strengthening participative, coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities within the societal fabric, these processes enable social systems to thrive amid uncertainty and adverse conditions.

This Policy Brief identifies Foresight processes’ different types of contributions to societal resilience, provides concrete examples from the FutuResilience Labs and calls on policy and decision makers to continuously embed participatory Foresight into crisis management.

Coping Capacity: Foresight processes help to make sense of a crisis and deal with uncertainty.

‍Adaptive/Transformative Capacity: Foresight processes enable social systems to adapt or even transform after a crisis, preparing for and imagining new futures worth striving for.

‍Participatory Capacity: Foresight processes mobilize a greater diversity of actors and perspectives for crisis solutions.

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Introduction

Foresight explores and anticipates possible developments to prepare for change or shape a preferable future. It taps into collective intelligence in a structured and systemic way. Strategic Foresight embeds future insightsinto policymaking, strategic planning, and preparedness. Foresight is not about predicting the future; it explores different possible futures alongside the opportunities and challenges they might present. Ultimately, Foresight helps policy and decision makers to act in the present to shape the future (adaptedfrom European Commission 2025).

The FUTURESILIENCE project implements scenario-based Foresight processes within 10 ‘FutuResilienceLabs’, creating capacity and strengthening European economic and social resilience. During the experimentation, diverse stakeholders engage in Foresight processes, tackling their specific critical situations, from health system adaptation to digital transformation and social fragmentation.

This Policy Brief examines the linkages between Foresight and societal resilience. It specifies potential Foresight contributions to societal resilience and illustrates these with examples from the FutuResilience Labs.

Policy implications and action items

Foresight processes can help policy and decision makers to cope with specific ongoing crises such as climate change, cybersecurity, and migration and enhance future preparedness. In addition, Foresight processes can underpin societal resilience on a much deeper level, enabling social systems to thrive amid uncertainty and adverse conditions.

Findings from the labs experience led to the following policy recommendations:

Identify community capacities to cope with system failures to mobilise diverse actors for crisis responseand imagine different futures as a core element of resilience, rather than merely focusing on crisisresponse in the narrow sense.
Implement Foresight exercises across EU agencies and national governments, particularly those dealing with crisis management. Using Foresight processes on a continuous basis rather than only to address specific challenges will enable striving resilient communities to respond to diverse challenges and changing conditions. Strengthen multi-level and
Strengthen multi-level and cross-sectoral private collaboration to increase participatory capacity anddesign training for the long-term view and unexpected events at the institutional level and multiplelevels of governance.
Develop scenario-based stress testing for policy design to create more resilient societal structures,including understanding the long-term effects of political decisions on future generations to increasetransformative capacity.

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