Horizon Scanning-Metafore

Horizon Scanning-Metafore Towards a Shared Future-Base for the European Research Area Stephan De Spiegeleire, The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies European Forum on Forward Looking Activities (EFFLA) Report March 2013 Introduction Europe is one of the global leaders in strategic foresighti. From a continent that was mired in its own troubled and conlict‐ridden past, Europe has been gradually emerging over the past few decades as a region that wants to jointly and conidently embrace its future. The European Union is widely acknowledged as playing a key role in this transformation. Its very existence is forcing its member states and their citizens to explore new forms of governance in order to remain globally competitive in a future world that keeps changing at vertiginous speeds. Its high‐level initiatives such as ‘Europe 2020’ intend to push the European policy agenda towards ambitious objectives in areas such as employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy. But nowhere is the forward‐leaning nature of the EU more visible than in the research area, where the European Union has been funding long‐term transnational framework programmes in many of the most promising ields of scientiic discovery. The size and scopeii of many of these programmes are truly unique – even in comparison to analogous ones in the United States, Japan or (increasingly) China. Foresight is an important ingredient in this overall research agenda. Across its different research priorities, the EU may very well fund more foresight work than any other actor in the world. And yet many of these efforts remain largely uncoordinated. Most research projects that address ‘the future’ tend to start from scratch and to do their own foresight work in their own ields with their own methods. This paper will examine whether it might be possible to develop a shared European future‐base by describing some experiences that were accumulated by a small European policy think tank from The Netherlands – the The Hague Center for Strategic Studies – that is primarily working in the ield of strategic studies. HCSS has been performing foresight work for various (national and multinational) public and private customers for about a decade now, and has also started building a more systematic ‘future‐base’ containing insights from a broad variety of global foresight studies. This paper will start by introducing the idea and the rationale behind such a ‘future‐base’, will then describe the method used by HCSS and present some examples from foresight studies published in 2012 in the ield of security. It will conclude with a brief analogous analysis of a number of EU FP7‐funded studies in order to show how EU research priorities could be compared to some of the indings from a future‐base like exercise. Towards a European Future‐Base The idea that policy‐making should become increasingly ‘evidence‐based’ is becoming ever more engrained in the minds of policy‐makers across the globeiii. The main ambition behind this idea is to help “people make well informed decisions about policies, programmes and projects by putting the best available evidence from research at the heart of policy development and implementation. iv ” “ [ T ] h e evidence based approach to decision making has gained momentum in recent years as it strives to improve the eficiency and effectiveness of policy making processes by focusing on ‘what works’v”. 1 But facts and evidence are by deinition about the past or – at best – the present. So what about the future? There are, by deinition, no ‘data’, no ‘facts’, no ‘evidence’ about the futurevi. In fact we are bombarded daily with various diverging views, visions, opinions about the future; with numerous quantitative attempts to extrapolate data about the future from data about the past (an endeavour that has proved quite perilous in many policy domains); and with various methodologies that the foresight community applies to ‘vision’ different futures. Although many of those elements may have numerous redeeming characteristics (they are often inspiring, challenging, threatening, amusing, etc.), it remains profoundly frustrating that we have no ways of empirically validating their reliability ex‐ante. And the few serious studies that have tried to assess their reliability ex‐post have arrived at quite bleak indingsvii. How then can we attempt to deal with the future in as dispassionate and rigorous a way as possible? And – most importantly – in a way that is actually useful for decision‐makers. What is the equivalent for the future of what ‘evidence’ is for the past and present? The The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies has been struggling (and continues to struggle) with this question for the past decade. We conduct applied strategic research for a number of public and (to a smaller extent) private sector customers in The Netherlands and beyond, and have been looking for ways to present decision‐makers with as balanced and informative an overview of the different insights about the future as we can muster. We try hard not to take sides in the many substantive, ideological, methodological, political, etc. debates that permeate discussions about the future. We are constantly and painfully reminded in our work of the various well‐known pathologies that we humans encounter when we try to wrap our minds around the futureviii. And so, with our eyes wide open, we have developed a set of tools to both collect, process and visualize an ever larger number of serious foresight studies (in multiple language domains) with an eye towards mapping the bandwidth of the various views about the future in a number of policy ields. We have called this approach ‘Meta‐fore’, representing HCSS’ attempt to lift the debate about the future to a higher level: beyond trying to predict the future (forecasting) towards critically but constructively developing and curating a more intellectually modest and honest overview of various diverse insights ix culled from a variety of different methodological approaches, academic disciplines, ideological schools, cultural backgrounds, etc. ((meta‐)foresighting). Figure 1 Future‐Base 2 The main ideas behind the development of such a broader shared future‐base are closely related to recent insights from the ield of complexity theoryx. If, as recent events seem to illustrate quite vividly, many of today’s most burning policy challenges are complex in the sense that they are the emergent result of the interaction between many (often poorly or at least incompletely understoodxi) intertwined actors and factors, then it also stand to reason that the solutions to these challenges are likely to be the emergent result of the actions of a variety of different actors that are directly or indirectly involved in them. Most of these actors are likely to have their own idiosyncratic views and perspectives on what the future might bring and what their role might be. Although many (none more than governments or international organisations) may perceive themselves as being at the centre of that constantly self‐reconiguring complex ecosystem, very few – if any – are likely to end up there. But some key actors could still position themselves more centrally by mapping these different futuribles and by depositing and curating them in a future‐base, by putting that future‐base at the disposal of a broader audience and by thus nudgingxii their own ecosystem to become more future‐oriented and possibly even future‐proof. We submit that the European Union may be ideally positioned to do this in a European context. To illustrate what such a future‐base might look like, the remainder of this paper will document the process through which we at HCSS have started building our own Metafore Future‐base with a particular focus on the efforts we made last year. We will present the approach and some sample indings from the (multilingual) Metafore‐work we have done in 2012 in one policy domain – ‘national security’. This work is based on one of the contributions HCSS made to the Dutch government’s 2012 Strategic Monitorxiii, a yearly public interdepartmental effort by the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Security and Justice to sketch some of the key new future developments in the area of ‘national security’. This corresponds to the ‘security’ part of the European Union’s broader societal challenge ‘Inclusive, innovative and secure societies’ within Horizon 2020xiv . While only a small element in the broader ‘Horizon 2020’ agenda, it is our hope that we can demonstrate what a broader future‐base – also beyond the ‘security’ topic that will be developed in this paper – might look like based on our own experiences in one policy domain. The HCSS ‘Metafore’‐Methodology HCSS maintains a database with security‐related foresight studies in different language domains. This year, the Dutch Ministry of Defense asked HCSS to update this database with security‐relevant foresight studies published last year in a number of different language domains and to systematically compare the views they contain about the future of the international system from a security perspective. The languages selected included English, French, German, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, and Turkish. The irst four language domains give an overview of Western perspectives, whereas the three other language domains capture views of other major regions that already play or are likely to play an important role in the global security environment. Our analysis of these indings draws upon an approach to foresight that has been developed by HCSS: the Metafore protocol. The protocol will be described succinctly in the next section; interested readers are referred to the HCSS online brochurexv and to some previous HCSS reports using the same approachxvi. The Team 3 HCSS assembled a multilingual team to conduct this analysis. Our partners were located in Ukraine for the Russian language domain, Singapore and the United States (hereinafter: US) for the Chinese language domain, and Ankara for the Turkish work.

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