The Competence Centre on Foresight supports EU policymaking by providing strategic and future-oriented input, developing an anticipatory culture inside the European Commission, continuously experimenting and developing different methods and tools to make foresight practically useful for decision-making processes.
Foresight tools
Foresight tools help make sense of signals of change, explore alternative futures and connect them to today’s policy decisions. They can be used in short workshops or multi‑stage processes and adapted to different policy areas.
- Horizon scanning and signals mapping: Systematically identify weak signals, trends and disruptions across domains, then cluster them into key issues that may affect your policy area in the medium to long term.
- Exploratory scenarios: Develop a small set of contrasting future worlds to explore how different combinations of drivers could reshape Europe and its policy priorities.
- Policy stress-testing with scenarios: Test existing or proposed policies against each scenario: where do they still work, where do they break, and what would need to change to stay effective across different futures?
- Backcasting from preferred futures: Start from an ambitious 2040–2050 vision (e.g. climate resilience, social cohesion, democratic robustness) and work backwards to identify milestones, enabling conditions and early actions from today onwards.
- Drivers–enablers–barriers analysis: Use the “futures triangle” and similar tools to distinguish pull drivers (visions and expectations), push enablers (technologies, capabilities) and weight barriers (institutional or societal obstacles), clarifying where policy can unlock change.
To better understand what you need to solve your policy problem, take a look at the Foresight Menu. The new, extended version of the Menu also includes case examples on different foresight project.
You can mix and match these tools in tailored processes, from half‑day 'policy labs' to multi‑session journeys accompanying the policy cycle.
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Time is not a neutral backdrop to policymaking – questions of pace, timing and horizons have become central to what we govern. Learn more about our conversation at PolyFutures.
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- EU policy lab
- Foresight
- Design for policy
- Behavioural insights
Space is often discussed as if its future were already mapped out: more satellites, more launchers, greater competition, higher performance. Yet this framing leaves little room to question how these futures are imagined in the first place.
- EU Policy Lab tags
- EU policy lab
- Foresight
- Design for policy
Technology foresight, like all foresight, is often misunderstood as attempting to predict what is coming. While it will not tell you the future, it can do something powerful: provide a structured way to explore possible futures and actively shape them.
- EU Policy Lab tags
- Foresight
- EU policy lab
We invited participants to engage in an unusual exercise: a conversation with young EU citizens from the year 2040.
- EU Policy Lab tags
- EU policy lab
- Design for policy
- Foresight
We have been developing a scenario-building tool designed to shift how we think about the future. Rather than focusing on what different futures might look like, this approach asks a more fundamental question: how do values and attitudes shape the futures we create?
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- Foresight
If Europe is to navigate an age of overlapping crises, it needs to cultivate new cultures of governance, not just new tools. Here is how the PolyFutures event imagined them.
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- EU policy lab
- Design for policy
- Foresight
- Behavioural insights
When artists, scientists, and policymakers collaborate over time, new forms of sense-making become possible: weak signals are detected earlier, insights flow across disciplines, and the very definition of what counts as evidence broadens.
- EU Policy Lab tags
- Design for policy
- Foresight
The Future-Oriented Policymaking (FOP) project, in partnership with the Reform and Investment Task Force (SG REFORM), invites policymakers all over Europe to learn new ways of approaching policymaking.
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- Foresight
The EU Policy Lab launched a policy experiment exploring how a trauma‑informed approach can enrich ongoing work such as the Directorate-General for Agriculture work on Generational Renewal in Agriculture.
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- Foresight
- Behavioural insights
- Design for policy
Across Europe, ambitious environmental policies have been multiplying, most notably under the European Green Deal. Yet translating these commitments into practical change is often uneven, slow, or incomplete. Read on to learn why this happens and can be done about it.
- EU Policy Lab tags
- Behavioural insights
- Design for policy
- Foresight