From polycrisis to PolyFutures: reimagining policymaking in Europe

Our first ever PolyFutures event, focusing on “reimagining policymaking for Europe” made one thing unmistakably clear: if Europe is to navigate an age of overlapping crises, it needs to cultivate new cultures of governance, not just new tools. To help us set the tone, we invited four inspiring keynotes who helped us trace a common arc: how to legislate for future generations, embed design as a public capability, re-imagine Europe’s story, and hard-wire foresight into institutions in ways that matter both to EU policymakers and to the global foresight and design community watching Europe’s next moves.  

From future generations to intergenerational fairness 

Derek Walker, Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, began with a provocative reorientation of who policy is for. His office exists explicitly to represent those not yet born, anchored in the Well‑being of Future Generations Act, a law that turns “sustainable development” from an optional ambition into a duty for public bodies. In Wales, the Sustainable Development Goals are a legal architecture of goals, indicators and oversight that requires long‑term thinking, prevention and collaboration across sectors. 

He talked about how this architecture is changing everyday decisions, pointing to areas like climate and nature, health, economic development, culture, language and food policy where the Act has nudged government away from short‑term fixes towards long‑term well‑being. It has also given communities a lever to challenge decisions and demand better, providing a shared language for what “acting today for a better tomorrow” should mean in practice. 

Continue to be inspired by Wales' work on future generations here: 

Set alongside the EU’s recent Intergenerational Fairness Strategy, the Welsh experience functions as a proof‑of‑concept. It shows that it is possible to legislate for future generations in a way that is concrete enough to shape budgets, programmes and accountability. Find out more about the EU Strategy on Intergenerational fairness, and the role of foresight, design and behavioural insights in shaping it here: Intergenerational fairness - EU Policy Lab - European Commission 

Design as a public capability 

If Derek Walker’s keynote asked “for whom do we govern?”, Nynke Tromp’s implicitly asked “with what capabilities?”. Her work with PONT (Public Design Practice) in the Netherlands starts from a diagnosis that many systems know all too well: when confronted with complex, cross‑cutting problems, the public sector’s instinct is often to commission more research or prolong consultation in search of consensus. Ironically, this can delay precisely the kind of learning and experimentation those problems require. 

PONT treats design not as a surface‑level improvement but as a public capability to be developed deliberately inside institutions. Through a collective learning infrastructure (book clubs, masterclasses, learning programmes, tools, reflective spaces and alliances with research and education) it helps civil servants understand what design can offer, when to use it and how to position it in a political‑administrative environment. 

Nynke framed design as playing three roles. As executive power, it helps re‑shape services and implementation. As strategic power, it informs long‑term direction and portfolio choices. As relational power, it convenes actors across ministries, municipalities, civil society and citizens to work on shared challenges. The emerging Public Design Coalitions around issues like adult low literacy, rural transitions or social resilience illustrate that design can be a way of orchestrating collaboration over time, not just running isolated projects. 

To learn more about her work you can see her slides here.

Europe as a designed narrative 

Johanna Fabrin, from 21st Europe, shifted the conversation from instruments to imagination. For her, Europe’s predicament is not only material (climate, geopolitics, technology), but narrative: we still tell ourselves stories geared to an economy and a world that are fading. The Draghi report’s stark warning, that without decisive action Europe will be forced to compromise either its welfare, environment or freedom, captures the stakes. But it does not dictate the story. 

Johanna argued that design has a particular power here: it can turn preferable futures from abstract scenarios into something we can see, feel and desire. Everyday examples, be it a beautifully minimalist but unusable door handle, or voting arrangements that silently exclude certain groups, show how design is always a political choice about who and what matters. That is as true for European infrastructure and regulation as it is for domestic hardware. 

Her blueprints with 21st Europe make this argument tangible. “Starline” reimagines an already existing policy on trans‑European transport networks as a people‑centred, high‑speed rail experience: a Europe where crossing borders by train feels as seamless as taking a metro, and where the journey itself reinforces a shared sense of place. “Made in Europe” builds on forthcoming digital product passports to suggest that Europe’s real export is not just goods, but trust, backed by verifiable information on emissions, labour standards and quality. 

These designs are invitations: prompts to see Europe’s scale, welfare model and regulatory strength as assets in designing ambitious futures, rather than as constraints that justify modesty. In this light, political failure can be read as a failure of imagination, and renewing Europe becomes, at least in part, a design brief. 

You can listen to Johanna’s full keynote speech here: 

 Foresight in a world of polycultures 

Where Johanna Fabrin explored narrative, Max Priebe from the Fraunhofer ISI turned to institutions. He focused on the “impact gap” that many in the foresight community will recognise: the gulf between the anticipatory knowledge we generate and the policy decisions that follow. Warnings about pandemics or geopolitical conflict, detailed analyses of emerging technologies, robust environmental scenarios: too often these remain on shelves or at the margins of decision‑making. 

Max argued that one reason lies in how we imagine the relationship between science, policy and society. We often picture a clean, linear interface, a monoculture in which evidence flows neatly from experts into policy. In reality, he suggested, our systems already function as polycultures: dense, heterogeneous ecosystems of ministries, agencies, advisory bodies, labs, citizen panels, designers and interest groups, each with its own logic and timeframe. 

His research on the institutionalisation of foresight in the German federal government shows that reform efforts frequently stay at the level of organisation charts: setting up units, hiring staff, naming strategic foresight officers. Without matching changes in rules and procedures, in norms and networks, and in deeper cultural‑cognitive assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, these units struggle to shift practice. Talk, decisions and actions become loosely coupled. 

Instead of treating friction and criticism as signs of failure, Max suggested recognising them as integral to functioning polycultures. Transformative state capacity, in this view, emerges when we work deliberately across all four institutional dimensions and accept that disruption, when and if appropriately managed, is often necessary to break path dependencies. The implication for both policymakers and practitioners is uncomfortable but hopeful: closing the impact gap is less about inventing new foresight methods than about re‑designing the environments in which they land. 

You can listen to Max’ full keynote speech here:  

PolyFutures as a living laboratory 

Taken together, the four keynotes mapped a shared frontier where law, design, narrative and institutional theory meet. For EU policymakers, the message is that long‑term strategies, be they on intergenerational fairness, digital transitions or green deals, will only deliver if they are accompanied by new architectures of accountability, new public capabilities and new stories in which people can recognise themselves. 

For the global foresight and design community, PolyFutures offered a rare glimpse into a major public institution experimenting, in real time. The EU Policy Lab’s role in convening these conversations matters: it signals that the European Commission is prepared to treat foresight and design as part of how it thinks and acts. 

Wales’s Act, PONT’s coalitions, 21st Europe’s blueprints and German foresight reforms are all context‑specific. Yet they point, in different ways, towards the same horizon: a Europe that sees itself as a polyculture of practices and perspectives, capable of governing for the long term precisely because it embraces diversity, friction and imagination as resources rather than problems.