As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, technology foresight started out as a method for facilitating long-term planning and policy primarily in relation to research & development (R&D) and innovation policy. In the last decade there has been and increasing focus on the usefulness of the methods used in R&D planning for other policy areas, especially social policy, i.e. education, labor, welfare, etc. The qualifier “technology” is often dropped from the term, referring to the exercises only as “foresight” because technology is not always a defining characteristic of the exercise although it could be argued that technology is an unavoidable factor in any long-term planning. This can cause some conceptual confusion since the generic term “foresight” has also often been used as a catch-all term for any sort of future-oriented policy or decision-making activity. Yet, I am going to venture into the conceptual quagmire and use the term “foresight” rather than “technology foresight” because I want to discuss the use of foresight activities in areas of policy-making that may not be directly related to technology, especially educational policy, and I think the use of the qualifier “technology” may cause confusion. Thus, what I mean by “foresight” is a deliberate and well-defined exercise intended to apply futures methodologies to social policy issues in order to inform long-term policy-making. The specific purpose of foresight activities is to identify and address elements of significant uncertainty that affect social policy and institutions. Foresight activities differ from specific futures methods, such as scenario construction, delphi studies and projections, in that they use a mix of the aforementioned methods, involve a broad range of stakeholder groups, including the general public, subject experts, policymakers, etc., and are specifically intended to facilitate long-term policy making in a range of areas by identifying possible future outcomes based on significant uncertainty factors.

As foresight exercises have transitioned from the somewhat confined realm of R&D policy, which, in the past, was often limited to specific industries or even specific organizations, to the broad realm of social policy, a gap has emerged in the foresight literature concerning the interface between foresight and policy-making. Most of the literature that I have discussed or mentioned in previous posts builds on Irvine & Martin’s seminal work focusing primarily on the structure and implementation of foresight exercises themselves with little attention to how the outcomes from such activities are translated into policy. Some recent research has sought to address this gap by examining closer how foresight functions as a policy-making instrument. Although this recent research has produced valuable results, what is still lacking is framing foresight as a policy-making instrument in terms of existing theoretical frameworks on policy-making processes. In this article I want to briefly address that gap and consider foresight from the perspective of a couple of existing theoretical frameworks, primarily Kingdon’s “multiple streams” model and Mazzoni’s “arenas” model.

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