The role of experts in foresight and corporate foresight has become increasingly debated, as empirical evidence suggests that expert predictions often underperform alternative approaches. This has shifted attention from what experts predict to how they construct and articulate futures. The objective of this study is to examine how experts discursively construct future-oriented narratives and how these processes are shaped by different types of informational input. Specifically, it advances four contributions: it conceptualizes expertise as a situated and practice-based activity, it reframes expertise as a performative and discursive accomplishment, it shows how temporal reasoning structures expert discourse, and it demonstrates how material inputs influence the way futures are constructed. Empirically, the study focuses on patient empowerment in healthcare, a domain undergoing significant technological and societal transformation. Drawing on a qualitative research design inspired by corporate foresight practices, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 Italian experts, divided into two groups, one of which was exposed to ChatGPT-generated foresight prompts. The findings show that experts construct futures through the dynamic mobilization of experience, contextual knowledge, and evaluative judgment. Moreover, AI-generated inputs do not simply affect the content of expert views, but shape how experts organize their reasoning and position themselves toward future developments. Overall, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of foresight as a practice and offers insights into how expert knowledge and material inputs jointly shape the construction of futures.
European rural futures are an increasingly important topic of debate due to the conflicting but interrelated transitions that need to take place. The Netherlands presents an interesting case since policymaking has been focusing on solving short-term crises around nitrogen deposition and the negative impacts of fertilizers and manure, with much societal polarization about the direction that rural transformation should take. Policymakers recently coined the term ‘future-proof’ in debates on rural transformations; however, much conceptual plurality exists on what is meant by the term. In this literature review, we analyze perspectives on governing rural futures based on two elements: 1) what is seen as the future problem that needs to be addressed, and 2) the pathways to pursue in the present. We distinguish four perspectives: a) a legal-economic perspective; b) a spatial perspective; c) a socio-cultural perspective, and d) a socio-political perspective. We then test these four perspectives as a reflexive framework to the case of the Netherlands. Thereby, we illustrate that a legal-economic perspective dominates and a spatial perspective is present to some extent. The socio-cultural perspective receives little attention and the socio-political perspective is a blind spot in decision-making. We hypothesize that the anticipatory governance of rural areas needs to reflect on all four perspectives in order to reach policy targets in a sustainable and socially just manner. The framework can be used for further conceptualizing and empirical research on rural futures in other contexts.
Although understanding the co-evolutionary relationship between digital government and the external environment is important, existing studies have not comprehensively examined this relationship. Such studies also suffer because their measurement of external environmental factors insufficiently capture the relative importance of different directional tendencies in environmental change. Thus, this study identifies, assesses and explains the relationship between digital government and the relative importance of megatrends using the Society, Technology, Economy, Environment, Politics and Values (STEEPV) framework. This foresight can serve as an agenda-setting function in the context of South Korean central digital government. Megatrends are used as indicators to capture the directional tendencies of macro-environmental change. First, this study identifies the relationships between digital government and megatrends. A total of 56 megatrends related to digital government were generated across the STEEPV categories through a literature review and a group interview with experts. Of these, 42 megatrends were retained through quantitative analysis. Second, these megatrends were prioritized in relation to South Korean central digital government, based on statistical analysis of the survey result. Third, the three highest-priority megatrends and their associated themes are presented and explained in the context of South Korean central digital government for each STEEPV category. Notably, megatrends affecting digital government are not limited to the technology category, as the megatrends across the other STEEPV categories are also associated with digital government. This foresight study highlights the theoretical and practical implications of path-dependent and path-breaking change in digital government through the context of socio-technical system.
Co-production has gained prominence as a useful and legitimate way to produce knowledge. By strengthening connections between stakeholders, it is said to diminish inequalities and empower people living in marginalised circumstances. However, participatory or consensus-based understandings of co-production often do not deliver on the promise of transformation since their practices risk co-option by powerful actors, possibly re-instating their power dynamics. Accordingly, scholars suggest that co-production should be re-politicised to achieve its transformative potential. The pluralistic capacity of agonism – framing opponents as ‘adversaries’ who respect each other’s right to exist, rather than as ‘enemies’ – is key to re-politicisation.This article describes how reflexive evaluation of pilot projects experimenting with inclusive technologies for people with a disability created a space where pluralism could thrive. Our empirical analysis of Speaksee – a set of microphones and an app that transcribes speech-to-text for people who are deaf or hard of hearing – illustrates how agonism became part of our co-production practice and eventually helped facilitate transformation. Our exploration of the Speaksee pilot project shows that reflexive evaluation, through the flexibility it offers, can provide space for agonistic pluralism. We also unpack the role researchers may play in agonistic co-production, emphasising how this requires us to navigate purpose-led action and new normativities.
In response to the accelerating biodiversity crisis, scholars increasingly emphasise the need for transformative change in land-use systems. Participatory scenario development (PSD) has emerged as transdisciplinary method for envisioning alternative futures and fostering stakeholder engagement in sustainability transformations. While the literature documents benefits of PSD, it also points to persistent methodological challenges and hampering factors, particularly regarding stakeholder inclusion, integration processes, and researchers’ roles within participatory settings, contributing to perceptions of PSD as a “black box”. This review critically examines PSD approaches in European agri-food systems and how these challenges have been addressed. Drawing on 49 peer-reviewed case studies published since 2000, we apply a mixed-methods coding strategy to explore the methodological implementation of PSD from a transdisciplinary research perspective, operationalised through four hypotheses addressing stakeholder involvement, integration processes, researchers’ roles, and outcomes. Our analysis reveals gaps in inclusivity, notably the limited integration of consumer perspectives, and highlights variation in PSD processes, often accompanied by insufficient transparency in documenting stakeholder integration. Moreover, researchers’ roles are frequently underdefined, undermining reflexivity and trust-building in transdisciplinary collaboration. Despite these limitations, many PSD initiatives yield outcomes beyond scenario results, including actionable knowledge and capacity building. We argue that methodological rigour, transparent process documentation, and explicit reflection on researchers’ roles are critical for advancing PSD as an effective transdisciplinary approach. This also requires reporting routines that make participatory processes, including challenges and adaptations, more visible for learning across cases. Addressing these dimensions more systematically may increase the transformative potential of PSD in complex sustainability contexts.
This paper examines how Transition Management (TM) visioning can be reconfigured to more explicitly engage with everyday experience, materiality, and embodied forms of sense-making in sustainability transitions. While participatory approaches to visioning increasingly incorporate immersive and material practices, TM visioning continues to privilege abstract, system-level imaginaries and offers limited guidance for integrating lived, place-based experience. Drawing on an empirical illustration from the Net Zero Precincts project in Melbourne, Australia, we mobilise practices from design anthropology (DA) and participatory design (PD) to reconfigure TM visioning. Guided walking tours and hands-on material world-building activities supported the co-creation of ten terrarium-based “Living Worlds” that articulate alternative net zero futures grounded in everyday life and place. We develop five guiding principles: situatedness, embodied experience, material speculation, plural imaginaries, and reflexive governance. These principles structure this approach to TM visioning and serve as analytical lenses for interpreting the process. A comparative analysis contrasts the Living Worlds with four TM-derived frames developed from earlier frontrunner interviews, showing how this reconfigured approach pluralises and grounds future imaginaries while retaining TM’s transformative orientation. The paper contributes to TM-oriented futures scholarship by demonstrating how DA and PD practices can reconnect visioning with lived experience, and by offering guiding principles to inform the design and analysis of participatory visioning practices beyond the empirical setting.
Artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly generative AI, is increasingly discussed as a transformative force in strategic foresight. Yet empirical evidence on how AI is integrated into organizational foresight practices, and with what epistemic and governance implications, remains limited. This paper examines the longitudinal evolution of strategic foresight practices at Siemens Professional Education (SPE), a central unit of Siemens AG responsible for anticipating future skill requirements and translating them into education and reskilling initiatives for more than 290,000 employees worldwide. The study compares a fully human-led foresight process (2023) with an AI-augmented process (2025). Drawing on process documentation, foresight outputs, time and resource estimates, interviews, and focus groups, we analyze how AI integration reshapes task allocation, resource use, and multiple dimensions of analytical quality across the foresight process. The findings show that AI integration does not lead to uniform acceleration or automation. Instead, it produces task-level efficiency gains, a redistribution of human effort, and enhanced analytical breadth, structure, and completeness, particularly in scanning, consolidation, and drafting activities, while framing, prioritization, contextual interpretation, legitimacy building, and accountability remain firmly human-led. Empirically observed trade-offs reveal persistent tensions between speed and legitimacy, analytical breadth and strategic focus, and standardization and organizational contextualization. Building on these findings, the paper develops a phase-specific model of human–AI collaboration in strategic foresight. The study contributes empirical grounding to debates on AI-enabled foresight and advances a socio-technical understanding of how anticipatory practices can evolve responsibly in the presence of increasingly capable AI systems.
Engaging with non-existent and non-identifiable future generations poses ontological and methodological challenges for sustainability discourse. This paper presents a workshop methodology that deploys AI as a configured persona-mediator alongside participant co-creation of 2050 personas and structured multi-phase dialogue. The methodology addresses how AI’s analytic role in participatory futures should be specified. The methodology operationalizes Future Accountability, a trans-generational framework distinguishing four interrelated dimensions: social empathy, co-existence, shared responsibility, and shared goals. We report findings from a workshop with 12 Korean participants drafting a declaration on a hypothetical UN Plastic Treaty. Deductive thematic analysis of 287 utterances with dual-rater reliability (Cohen’s κ=0.97) revealed that each dimension operates not as a unified capacities but as plural registers: social empathy emerged across three registers (possessive, ontological, and cross-cohort), and co-existence operated across two (constitutive, in foundation phases; reflexive in final reflection), jointly accounting for 83 percent of persona-construction utterances. Two groups receiving identical AI configurations produced dimensional trajectories that diverged by over 50 percentage during declaration drafting, indicating that AI design configures a possibility space whose outcomes are shaped by participants situated practice. The study contributes (1) a workshop methodology integrating AI persona-mediation and co-creation personas as a concrete mechanism for trans-generational engagement; (2) empirical evidence of plural-register operation in social empathy and co-existence, refining the framework’s analytic granularity beyond unified capacity formulations; and (3) a design-study formulation that reframes AI persona design from a technical solution to a configured interaction specification mediated by dialogue design and situated participant practice.
This paper develops an innovative conceptual framework of hope for embracing radical uncertainty in transitions. Literature on narratives of hope has not fully operationalized the concept of hope, which is needed to provide scholars with a better understanding of what embracing radical uncertainty through hope exactly means. To fill this research gap, this paper explores and unpacks the work on hope of public theologian Jonathan Sacks. Sacks understands hope as a journey in which actors gradually learn how to collectively take responsibility for improving their shared living conditions. The paper uses a transversal reasoning approach in which scholars from diverse disciplines jointly and critically unpack Sacks’ understanding of hope. This understanding is based on three key elements of a hopeful response to radical uncertainty: (1) change of identity, (2) active empathy and (3) relational knowledge. Furthermore, Sacks highlights the importance of two institutions to support these elements: (1) covenant and (2) public Sabbath. This conceptual framework of hope is applied to a infrastructure megaproject, which is confronted with radical uncertainty. The findings contribute to transition studies by offering a novel conceptual framework of hope for embracing radical uncertainty. Furthermore, the framework contributes to the theoretical development and practical application of the concept of hope.
Futures literacy can serve not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a collective process through which communities work with uncertainty and make shared priorities, roles, and follow-up dynamics more visible. This article examines the case of the Maré favela complex in Rio de Janeiro, developed in partnership with Redes da Maré, and asks how a Futures Literacy Laboratory can help convert liminal uncertainty into collective, performative agency in a vulnerable urban setting. Using participatory action research, we co-led a UNESCO-type Futures Literacy process in Maré between November 2023 and July 2024, with a later follow-up phase in 2025. The empirical material includes workshop artefacts, field notes, participant reflections, and field reports from the 2024 Maré Futures Week and the 2025 Futures Pollinators workshop. The results show how the process moved from the surfacing of assumptions to the reformulation of themes, the selection of priorities, and the emergence of early forms of follow-up. The article’s main contribution is the Maré Framework, which names the sequence that became visible through the case: Uncertainty → Displacement → Cognitive Openness → Futures Exploration → Social Recommitment. The framework is proposed as a grounded way of linking lived uncertainty, structured futures work, and the collective orientations that may remain after the workshop.
This paper introduces a data-driven foresight approach for analyzing and mapping entrepreneurial ecosystems. Using CrunchBase metadata on blockchain ventures (2014–2019), we identify strong and weak signal business areas in the blockchain technology through a keyword-based analysis and assess entrepreneurial ecosystems’ growth and venture capital activities in these areas. The analysis identifies Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Zug, Singapore, London and Hong Kong as leading hubs for strong signal business areas in the blockchain technology, while Atlanta, Dubai, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco stand out in weak signal business areas. A multilevel logistic regression analysis is also implemented to examine the relationships between our constructed foresight-based analytical indicators (2014–2019) and subsequent patterns of blockchain venture emergence and growth (2020–2023) across entrepreneurial ecosystems. The findings provide exploratory insights into how signal-based analyses of emerging business areas can enhance understanding of entrepreneurial ecosystem dynamics.
Futures studies continues to grapple with the tension between reproductive practices that stabilise dominant imaginaries and emancipatory ones that open space for alternative ways of being. Education faces a parallel paradox: positioned as a vehicle for ecological transformation yet complicit in reproducing the extractivist and presentist logics driving environmental crisis. This paper develops a theoretical framework for future design (FD) as an educational intervention and tests its plausibility through an exploratory study. Our primary contribution is conceptual: we theorise FD—a participatory method widely applied in policy contexts but rarely in education—as a temporal-ethical pedagogy, drawing on futures and education scholarship. We identify five mechanisms through which FD reorients learning: locating learners in time, consequence imagination, widening moral concern, deliberation across difference, and reframing agency. We probe the empirical plausibility of this framework through a workshop with secondary students in Japan and follow-up interviews, which indicate three dynamics: destabilising the normalcy of the present, (re)activating the ethical dimension of learning, and encounters with “futurability selves.” Mapping these themes onto our theoretical mechanisms reveals the strongest support for temporal-existential mechanisms (locating learners in time, consequence imagination, reframing agency) while identifying the relational-deliberative mechanisms (widening moral concern, deliberation across difference) as promising but requiring sustained engagement. We caution against tokenistic adoption of FD as a curricular add-on and argue instead for its integration as distributed, reflexive practice. The study opens a research agenda at the futures-education nexus, demonstrating how participatory futures methods may be repurposed as pedagogical tools for expanding education’s emancipatory potential.
This study anticipates the variations of adaptability among six actor groups and explains the underlying reasons behind the highest and lowest adaptability to artificial intelligence (AI) in the Korea automotive sector. This theoretically uses socio-technical system, focusing on actor-related adaptability. First, different adaptabilities to AI among six actor groups are identified: AI technology suppliers currently show the highest adaptability; large corporations (automakers and their suppliers) will have it in the future; and the public authority group denotes the lowest adaptability. Second, we identified that incumbent automakers and some large automotive part suppliers show similar and higher adaptabilities. In contrast, some large suppliers showed the low adaptability, because of the rigidity of R&D and innovation activities and the lack of well-organized practices regarding AI. Although AI suppliers relatively show higher adaptabilities at two time points, small-and-medium AI solution providers seem to encounter the scale disadvantage, insufficient capital and uncertain demand for their AI solutions, while autonomous-driving solution providers, entrants, struggle to grow the niche market of mobility service. Last, the lowest adaptabilities of the public authority group stem from immature policy actions, organizational rigidity and the problem of leadership. The findings imply the adaptation patterns of AI in production firms, suppliers and public authorities. They imply who leads a socio-technical transformation and how to form the stratification, by indicating different adaptabilities and their change in each actor group and between them. This helps understand how a system transformation shapes through the co-evolution among actor groups at regime-level.
Environmental psychology has begun exploring how the climate futures people imagine shape their feelings about the ecological crisis and their responses – research on eco-emotions and pro-environmental behaviour is a notable example, yet both face two challenges. On one hand, people are asked about hopes and fears in relation to abstract or pre-defined placeholders, leaving aside the content of their imaginations. On the other hand, these studies focus on snapshots rather than processes, omitting the conditions and events that drive transformations. I propose to foreground climate futures, that is, the imagined content people associate with the consequences and solutions to the ecological crisis, with imagination denoting the process that gives them form. Drawing on a sociocultural psychological model of the imagination and longitudinal diary research, I detail how climate futures can be analysed in terms of their content, the resources that scaffold them, and their development over time. This approach allows researchers to explore which climate futures people are anxious about and which may instigate pro-environmental action, and when and why these fluctuate. Climate futures are imagined unevenly, and attending to their content and dynamism can refine our understanding of and response to the ecological crisis.
