Summary of the Foresight Workshop with international experts (7 July 2008)

The Foresight Workshop with international experts was held on 7 July 2008 at UNESCO Headquarters with the objective to:

• provide mainly the Secretariat, but also Member States of UNESCO with data and resources for reflection concerning the function and the importance that anticipation and foresight may have for International Organizations, at global and regional levels;
  
• foster exchanges of experiences on foresight and anticipation so as to benefit from external expertise and to develop a culture of future-oriented thinking in the Secretariat as a whole and in particular in the different programme Sectors and to reinforce the linkage between foresight and strategic planning within UNESCO ;
  
• consider the different ways in which the foresight function could be reinforced and redefined;
  
• envision what could be done to strengthen and better define UNESCO’s foresight function within UNESCO.

The workshop brought together a dozen leading international experts broadly representing main actors in the field of foresight: units operating within governments, ministries or administrations, universities, independent think-tanks or governmental or non-governmental international, regional or national organizations. (Hélé BEJI ; Colin BLACKMAN ; Roberto CARNEIRO ; Souleymane Bachir DIAGNE ; Nadezhda GAPONENKO ; Thierry GAUDIN ; Jerome GLENN ; Yersu KIM ; Mohamed MANSOUR ; Dennis MEADOWS ; Francisco José MOJICA ; Jacques THEYS ; Kimon VALASKAKIS).

• 1st session: “What future prospect for anticipation and foresight?”

The first session panellists insisted on the growing need for governments and international organizations to tackle long-term problems with adapted tools and methods. Indeed, the challenges of the day – climate change, energy or shared and sustainable development – cannot be faced if no long term perspective is brought into actions and decisions.

After the presentations, two views predominated during the debate. (i) To some, foresight should be as close to action as possible looking a few years ahead only. (ii) According to others, foresight is defined by long-term outlook and all futures, even the most distant, must be taken into consideration.

Many questions were raised: how are these imperatives to be conciliated? What kind of foresight should be favoured? Can long-term foresight be integrated into strategic perspectives? How do we avoid making strategic choices in emergency?

• 2nd session: “From knowledge to anticipation, from anticipation to action”

During the second session, the panellists stressed that it was necessary to introduce new decision making processes integrating the future consequences of our actions on the planet and the human species. Some experts have underlined the key role of the intellectual watch functions while others insisted on the necessity to provide decision makers with methodologies to assist them in their strategic choices.

All panellists agreed that future studies are fundamentally a field where the values underlying strategic choices can be debated. In this perspective, foresight is a place for dialogue where experts and decision makers, intellectuals and scientists, politicians and business people can elaborate a common language.

• 3rd session: “What scale is fit for thought, what scale is fit for action?”

In this session, the experts underlined the double function of foresight: anticipating global trends and helping to formulate policies reflecting these trends, especially at the level of local contexts. Two current evolutions in the field of foresight have been highlighted that UNESCO should take into account in the elaboration of its strategies. First, some experts have remarked that participation is becoming a key aspect of foresight processes, which tend to include a growing number of partners. Secondly, many experts insisted that the current problems of the world cannot be solved through local actions only: global actions are needed which require adapted institutional frameworks.

• 4th session: “How do international organisations successfully incorporate future thinking?”

The experts suggested different path to reinforce the role of anticipation and foresight in the governance of international organisations. To some, the chief task is to move foresight closer to the requirements of action which can be achieved by stressing the middle term and providing clearly defined strategic action plans and agendas. According to other experts, future oriented activities must be conducted within international networks that integrate international organisations, government units and universities.

Two contrasted positions surfaced in the debate. A number of experts asserted that foresight has to address the methods and the criteria governing the business and the political worlds, and to respond in a flexible way to the expectations of the various target groups of foresight. Other experts were of the opinion that, in the context of globalization and the ecological crisis, foresight specialists should change their language so as to address decision makers, but they also emphasized that strategic concerns should not have precedence over foresight.
As for UNESCO, it seems that, in any case, a well designed watch system can help better rely the strategic function and the foresight function while maintaining their specific roles.

• 5th session: “UNESCO and Foresight: what scenarios for the future? How are foresight activities, strategic planning and programme sector policies to be connected?”

According to all the experts, an organisation cannot successfully adapt to accelerating changes of the world without foresight lighting the way for strategy. It was also admitted that an organisation can assume foresight functions only if it has a clear notion of its own nature and of its past. Lastly, the experts all agreed that foresight cannot shed dimension of creation and exploration.

In this perspective, it is essential to renounce the idea that there exists “one unique kind of foresight”: foresight is actually a diversifying field and there is not one best way to practice foresight. One expert suggested at least four types of foresight, which are rarely found to function independently:

1. a foresight of models, dedicated to trends and projection ; it helps bridging scientists and futurists;
   
2. an exploration foresight, designed to propose new lines of thinking and to build “visions of the future” in an organization or a community;
   
3. a watchtower foresight, which seeks to identify “weak signals”, such as innovations, new ideas, which may be difficult to detect but are likely to develop into major trends; this type of foresight is centred on innovations and breaking points;
   
4. a strategic foresight aiming at linking identified objectives and long term challenges in an uncertain environment.
   

Foresight being manifold, its functions are not homogenous and they vary with the nature, the missions and the needs of the organizations. Three types of situations or scenarios have been identified:

1. the outsourcing scenario: an institution with no culture of anticipation or long-term issues at stake may nonetheless have specific and limited needs in foresight watch and analysis that can be outsourced to external institutions;
   
2. the translation scenario: an institution with a culture of anticipation and long term-issues at stake must have a regular and permanent foresight activity which is at the service of the strategic planning and act as a translation medium between long term goals and operational needs;
   
3. the exploration scenario: an institution with a culture of anticipation and long-term issues at stake and which has a regular and permanent foresight activity may recognize that, in a given key field, it needs to make an important foresight investment, to which all the strategic directions are to participate. This scenario implies that the issue at stake is important and shared in the organisation.
   
   In conclusion, below is a list of propositions that were made during the workshop and which could be of interest to UNESCO:
   
   • Networks of foresight units:contribute to the capacity-building efforts of Member States through the promotion of international foresight networks. Those would, in particular, connect anticipation and foresight units of governments and private companies, independent think-tanks and NGO’s; developing countries would receive special attention, notably in countries without foresight capacities;
     
   • Sustainable development at the crossroads of science and foresight: build a strong anticipation component into sustainable development-related programmes in the South and in the North notably through the promotion of anticipation studies based on the existing knowledge bases in the natural and the social sciences;
     
   • Function of laboratory of ideas and of interdisciplinary forum: in order to put more emphasis on future-oriented debates, open exploratory anticipation and interdisciplinary forums should receive an increased attention both at the international and the regional levels;
     
   • Participative foresight: take advantage of the Internet’s potential for distance communication to organise anticipation and foresight workshops: UNESCO’s programme sectors and representatives of the Member states and the civil society could be enrolled to contribute to the elaboration of visions of the future reflecting UNESCO’s mandate priorities;
     
   • University-centred foresight cooperation: create or promote foresight networks connecting universities around the world so as to stimulate interdisciplinary synergies between scientific research centres and foresight units, foster the circulation of people and ideas, link global challenges to local needs, and promote capacity building in the field of future studies.
     
   • Foresight as a necessary instrument to restore hope in the future: promote the reflection on an ethics of the future and define a common language to cope with the future; UNESCO foresight function should identify with a humanistic project aimed at the youth in particular. It should also be a reflection and a tool designed to ground political decisions in future oriented ethical principles and to reorient, if need be, strategic courses.