Author: Isabella Maglietti Smith (ODT)
Editor: Miranda García (AEIDL)
MOVING partners from the Origin for Sustainability (ODT) team, coordinators of the Swiss Jura Reference Region, have launched a guideline to implement participatory foresight exercises at regional, cross-regional and pan-European levels.
But what is foresight?
It is a methodology to help policy and decision-makers as well as local actors to define and explore future scenarios in a structured way and identify the policy changes and the other actions needed to achieve it. It can be used as a tool to influence the strategic planning and future of the territory.
How will MOVING implement foresight?
To run its foresight exercises, MOVING will organise 3 workshops in each of the 23 partner regions, 5 clusters and 1 European.
During each workshop, MOVING partners and relevant mountain stakeholders will envision the situation of the mountain value chain and their territory by 2050 (the so-called “baseline scenario”). Then, they will develop four possible future scenarios, each one responding to a different combination of economic, social, and ecological indicators. For each of the 4 scenarios, participants will discuss how the actors will react to expected and unexpected changes and how these reactions will affect the resilience and the sustainability at the scale of the MRR (Mountain Reference Region), or for good reasons, a more specific delimited area.
The results of the regional foresight exercise carried out in each of the 23 MOVING reference regions will be compared with each other. Hence, the 23 case studies will be clustered into 5 groups -(i) demographic and social aspects, (ii) technology and innovation, (iii) territoriality, cooperation and governance, (iv) environment, ecosystems, nature and change, (v) PDO, quality and value and heritage-. A similar exercise will be performed at a pan-European level with the stakeholders involved in the MOVING EU MAP.
The outcomes of the foresight exercise will contribute to policy recommendations. In order to envision the desirable future, policy gaps and needs will be identified.
To better understand MOVING Participatory multi-level foresight exercises, watch the explanatory video by Luca Piccin (ODT).