CIVISTI

-> 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.

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, Technology and Innovation (CIVISTI 2008-2011). In this paper we introduce and discuss this method as a reflexive instrument for integrating different types of knowledge and creating a bridge between short- and long-term planning.