What we do

We invited participants to engage in an unusual exercise: a conversation with young EU citizens from the year 2040.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Foresight Hub’s goal is to build foresight capacity among European Commisison Blue Book trainees, foster cross-service collaboration, and create dedicated spaces for young people to contribute their perspectives to EU policymaking.

The future of ocean observation will not be driven by a single solution, but by convergence - technological and human. It will rely on integrating diverse sensors, autonomous platforms, and AI-enabled analytics.