With the help of a team of experts, future visions of citizens were turned into tangible recommendations for the EU-parliament.
CIVISTI is an EU-wide collaboration which aims to evaluate relevant topics and priorities, offering different perspectives on pressing social issues. The results show that both citizens and experts are strongly in favour of sustainable solutions for the future, such as attractive public transport or the development of eco-cities.
Through CIVISTI, a new qualitative foresight-method was developed and tested in seven EU-countries. ITA conducted this process in Austria. Every country involved 25 citizens, male and female, that were selected by predefined criteria. They developed visions on a future in 30-40 years from now, discussing their hopes and fears on a personal, a social and a European level.
The visions of the participants differed greatly, but showed that overall Austrian citizens imagine technical, social and organisational innovations to interact. Among the spelled out examples were “our personal-electronic-simultaneous-translator”, or, on a more philosophical level, “dying with dignity – end-of-life-care within the family”.
The collected catalogue of visions was then presented to experts and stakeholders from the areas of technology foresight and technology policy. They formulated recommendations which will be presented within the scope of the upcoming EU-framework programme Horizon 2020. The involved citizens again discussed and prioritised the recommendations.
Among the most popular recommendations were:
In January 2011 the project team came together with the participants, scientists and members of the European Commission (DG RTD) at a policy workshop in Brussels to present the results and start the discussion.
-> What should the city of the future look like? How do we want to live in 2050? What will we eat? Citizens, experts and stakeholders answer these kinds of questions with the aid of CIVISTI, a new participatory method.
-> Laypersons’ and experts’ knowledge and creativity are cross-linked to include a variety of views whilst shedding light on questions relevant to the future.
-> Results broaden the basis for robust decisions and support long-term planning.
-> Wie soll die Stadt der Zukunft aussehen? Wie wollen wir 2050 leben? Was werden wir essen? BürgerInnen und Fachleute beantworten diese Fragen mit Hilfe von CIVISTI, einer neuen Beteiligungsmethode.
-> Das Wissen und die Kreativität von Laien und Fachleuten werden verknüpft, um zukunftsrelevante Fragen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven zu beleuchten.
-> Die Ergebnisse schaffen die Basis für robuste Entscheidungen und unterstützen eine langfristige Planung.
Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes.
Long-term planning with a time-horizon beyond 20 to 30 years is an established element of policy- making in some core fields such as certain infrastructure policies, and is a substantial principle of sustainable development. At the same time short- and medium-term planning is much more usual in the search for ad-hoc solutions to environmental, economic and social challenges. Economic ac- tors apply flexible policies and use short-term opportunities for their profit. Environmental and so- cial problems also sometimes imply short-term solutions for the survival of a system in acute dan- ger. This creates a paradoxical situation: the society in question needs to define long-term targets for its infrastructure and achieves systematic changes pursuing those, but the necessary short-term actions and flexibility applied to stay functionable might not be in line with longterm goals. If this apparent paradox cannot be solved through an appropriate governance method, it might lead to a conflict between different policy goals. The concept of reflexive governance for transition man- agement tries to solve this apparent paradox and combines a number of short-term planning proc- esses in a stagewise and reflexive way to create a more comprehensive and innovative process of long-term planning for a sustainable development. Future-oriented analyses and forward-looking activities are a fix element at each stage. This contribution points out some key questions for a flexible long-term planning process within the framework of sustainable development. The main challenge is how different knowledge types such as citizens’ visions and experts’ recommenda- tions can be integrated into long-term planning in order to support an interactive decision-making process that considers a broader basis of information. CIVISTI, an innovative forward-looking ap- proach, addresses this challenge. The CIVISTI method has been developed during the recent EU- project on Citizen Visions on Science, Technolog