Democracies in Europe have demonstrated resilience and modernisation in the face of various social and technological challenges. Democracy in the age of the Anthropocene will necessitate radical shifts in values, power relations and modes of governance, while also being built on the present, in all its diversity, paradox and insufficiency. Innovating to meet these challenges will require re-imagining how people living in democracies become equipped and supported to co-create resilient, democratic futures in Europe and beyond. Clear visions are needed to build strategies that allow for rethinking and redesigning spaces, institutions, instruments and ways to represent and include people in democratic governance. YouthDecide 2040 aims to support European Union democracy to rise to these challenges through evidence-based historical and contemporary knowledge, strategic foresight, and robust deliberation. 

Specifically, YouthDecide 2040 has the main objective to: co-create with European youth – and older generations, political and institutional actors, and organised civil society – coherent pathways to desired futures of democracy in the European Union in 2040. We translate our main objective into a series of research questions that need to be answered to support the work. Each question is connected to a key objective and corresponding work packages to support co-creation. All activities are planned to be inclusive and open processes – transparently documented along the way – to enable repetition and implementation beyond the life of the project. The project’s ambition is to reinvigorate democracy in and across Europe with visions and pathways – made with active and inclusive citizen participation – for becoming more resilient to current and future challenges. 

Preferred scenarios, and visions from YouthDecide 2040 will aim to inform research and innovation pathways. They will help ensure the alignment of future and ongoing research and innovation with the values and needs of the democratic societies within the EU that support their advancement. The YouthDecide 2040 consortium comprises 11 partners with research expertise in areas of democracy research, foresight, participatory deliberation, co-creation, strategy development, as well as partners working in youth representation and organization, democracy advocacy, design, and multimedia communication. The project duration is three years, until the end of 2027 and it has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101177438. 

Today, there is broad consensus that it must be the task of politics to ensure justice and freedom across generations. Not only courts and social movements worldwide are calling for a strengthening of forward-looking and provident governance. Many political actors within and outside the German government are also demanding a strengthening of capacities for long-term thinking and action in order to better meet the major challenges of the 21st century. How can we succeed in making policy more forward-looking? How can we strengthen our ability to deal with uncertainty and complexity? How would processes and structures have to change to achieve this? What role can strategic foresight (SF) play here?
These questions were addressed in the study conducted by the Fraunhofer ISI Foresight Team together with Prof. Sylvia Veit (administrative scientist at the University of Kassel) on behalf of the Federal Chancellery.
The aim was to examine the status quo in Germany and to develop various options for institutionalising strategic foresight as a process, method and approach in the German government's policy and administration, and to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages. This should create a basis for discussion for the further anchoring of strategic foresight in government action.

Humans establish highly diverse and situated relationships with nature. Over generations, these human-nature relations transform dynamically. In doing so, future imaginaries, expectations and visions accompany our commitment to, action in and representation of nature. Genres such as climate fiction and practices such as ocean clean-ups provide insights into (re-)emerging social, cultural and emotional connections between people and nature.

Future Lives with Oceans and Waters (FLOW) looks forward and explores changing human-nature relationships in the context of aquatic ecosystems. The transdisciplinary project brings together foresight, research on socio-ecological interactions, marine science and natural resource management with young people from across Europe. FLOW aims to create new knowledge and connections to reinforce a new perception of the importance of aquatic ecosystems in the Anthropocene. To do so, the project combines horizon scanning, ethnographic fieldwork, experiential futures workshops and co-creation in an innovative way. As a Research and Innovation Action, FLOW supports the Restore Our Oceans Mission of the EU.

❓ Why hasn't the government gotten back to us about this great foresight study we did? 

If you are involved in #PolicyOrientedForesight, #AnticipatoryGovernance and #StrategicIntelligence, you may have questioned the fit and impact of your work on policy. In our new publication, Philine Warnke, Sylvia Veit and I problematize these complicated foresight-policy interactions.

📖 "Understanding Foresight-Policy Interactions"

We propos e "institutionalization" as a process that shapes the formation of working practices and routines along four dimensions. Rather than trying to measure how foresight affects policy decisions, we are looking at how institutionalization affects the government's ability to absorb, interpret, and adopt anticipatory practices.

Our findings
-Decades of research on policy advice have taught us that simply providing 'better' methods does not necessarily result in 'greater' impact.
- We argue that one conducive factor for avoiding loose ends in foresight-policy interactions and facilitating absorption of results consists in its institutionalization along all dimensions (organizational, regulative, normative, and cognitive-cultural).
- foresight does not align well with the existing structures and procedures of the federal ministerial bureaucracy in Germany which are characterized by a strong departmental principle, resulting in ‘turf wars’ and ‘negative coordination’.
- The findings of our research suggest that a purely rationalist approach to the adaptation of foresight is inadequate.

This work represents the academic spin-off for an international readership of a study commissioned by the German Federal Chancellery and published in 2022.
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