This article is written by Miguel Poiares Maduro, director of the Future Forum of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Professor at Universidade Católica and the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, and Cat Tully, founder of SOIF, the School of International Futures in London.

How can we build a Europe that is resilient, prosperous and sustainable in the face of significant uncertainty and an ever-increasing pace of change?

That question was the focus of November's European Strategy and Political Analysis System (Espas) conference, which saw the launch of a new EU Foresight Network. The network is a clear reminder to EU member states of the importance of long-term thinking to help make better decisions today. (You can learn more about the new network by emailing Erica Bol at the Foresight Unit of the Joint Research Centre, European Commision.)

The simple reason why long-term thinking is so vital now is because of the enormity of the challenges we face, and the scale of the solutions we must design.

The NextGenerationEU initiative is a €750 billion ($918bn) temporary recovery instrument intended “to mitigate the economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic and make European economies and societies more sustainable, resilient and better prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the green and digital transitions.” It is a vast investment intended to benefit people, the planet, and our social and political systems far into the future by addressing climate change, digitisation and social justice. This vision should be supported by meaningful mechanisms to ensure that the funds are used in a way that is sustainable and intergenerationally fair.

At Espas, Angel Gurria, Secretary-General of the OECD emphasised this point: “The design of these major investments will have consequences for decades. We must use foresight to help future-proof recovery plans.”

In other words, we should invest that money in ways that build a legacy for the future.

Embedding foresight in policy-making

This momentum has been building for a long time.

In the wake of the financial crises in Portugal, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation identified a need to evaluate public policies according to what is fair for all generations.

Over the past two years, the Foundation and the School of International Futures having been working together to develop a methodology to allow policy-makers, media, think-tanks, and civil society to systematically assess the distributional impact of public policies on present and future generations, in order to promote better and fairer public policies.

That initiative reveals that strategic foresight — starting from the wider environment to identify what is changing and how this might affect the working environment — gives us a powerful lens to stress test decisions, particularly through the use of alternative future scenarios. Coupled with the latest thinking in policy assessment and better regulation, it is possible to trace the impact of our decisions throughout their life-span and highlight choices which may disadvantage people now and in the future. (This primer helps you get started using strategic foresight in your work.)

To be effective, thinking about the long-term needs to be institutionally inserted into the decision-making process of government

For example, in our methodology, decision-makers examine the impact of their policy on people in different age groups and time horizons, and determine whether the policy moves society closer to or further away from its vision for the future and goals for sustainable development. Assessors testing the process report that the methodology challenges their assumptions and surfaces issues they wouldn’t normally consider. This is a powerful way to surface unintended or unidentified consequences of policies. (You can learn more about our policy assessment methodology and resources for piloting it here.)

We believe that similar mechanisms should be used to ensure the interests and voices of all generations are part of the process for determining how the EU Recovery Funds will be spent.

A legacy for the future

To be effective, thinking about the long-term needs to be institutionally inserted into the decision-making process of government. We focus on national and EU institutions, but it is relevant globally.

We need not just administrative competence to think long-term, but also societal support and independent oversight, since thinking about fairness in the future will often require some insulation from the immediate political pressures of the day.

Europe, and its Member States, are about to make a series of incredibly powerful spending decisions with tomorrow’s money. With the right governance systems, we have a unique opportunity to embed the principle of intergenerational fairness in those recovery plans.

Those systems should be linked to the EU foresight network, pooling resources and providing institutional capability to inform those decisions through evidence about their long-term impact. Only this will ensure the legacy for the future we all aspire to. — Miguel Poiares Maduro and Cat Tully

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