Valentina Amuso, Cici Chen and Kohen Heng
The growing complexity and co-occurrence of multiple crises make accounting for uncertainty and processes to “domesticate the future” in policy increasingly critical. Yet traditional public policy approaches often struggle to do so. Addressing this gap is central to strategic foresight, which provides a set of methods for systematically exploring possible and probable futures.
The question, then, is how to integrate these approaches into public policy training and reinvigorate educational programmes. Bridging policymaker toolkits and teaching may further sustain a shift towards long-term thinking that enhances preparedness for crises affecting societies.
Strategic foresight has become increasingly relevant in policy design and planning in the EU, and is described as a pillar in the EU Preparedness Union Strategy. As a discipline, strategic foresight brings together a range of methods used to explore possible and probable futures. Its underlying rationale is not to attempt prediction, but rather to cultivate critical thinking around preparedness and the capacity of policies to remain resilient over time. The compounded nature of recent crises and current fragilities have brought preparedness and resilience firmly to the forefront of policy debates. While preparedness, as outlined in a the Niinistö report for the European Commission, reflects the ability to anticipate, prevent and respond, resilience denoted the broader ability to withstand the shocks, and as highlighted by European Union, to “bounce forward, in a sustainable, fair and democratic manner.” Notions of preparedness and resilience have, indeed, come to underpin policymaking processes within the European Union.
Against this background, we argue that educational approaches should increasingly embed strategic foresight thinking. This step is essential. As crises become concurrent and increasingly interrelated, training in policymaking, public policy, and diplomacy must be structured around the need to consider long-term consequences and interconnected dynamics. In practice, this need can also be addressed through courses on strategic foresight offered at UCL, such as the Political Science module Innovation: Political Economy and Policy Perspectives. The course is designed to provide practical training for future policymakers by fostering familiarity with key methodological approaches and enhancing understanding of policy strategies and their unintended future consequences. Developing policy requires looking beyond an immediate area of focus to examine how decisions may ripple across other domains.
Together with the UCL Diplomacy Society, and in response to a changing political climate, we organised a training session focused on strategic foresight to explore polycrisis. We relied on the Foresight Toolkit (i.e., the Polycrisis exploration toolkit) developed by the European Commisison’s science and knowledge service, Joint Research Centre (JRC). The toolkit has been developed for decision-makers to explore interconnected risks and to manage resulting and potential crises.
As part of the training with the UCL Diplomacy Society, we structured the polycrisis analysis around the following prompt: ‘Tech Sovereignty (2035) A world divided between Al-rich and Al- dependent states, where control over chips, data, and computing power determines global power and shapes new digital blocs.’ Students were asked to identify three risks that could inform and affect such a scenario from a pool of forty risks. Following the selection, participants were asked to describe the manifestation of each risk and what a crisis associated with each would look like. Subsequently, for each of the three crises, students mapped the intended and unintended consequences using a a Futures Wheel, resulting in a total of three interconnected wheels. We then reflected on what factors might contribute to the emergence of such risks and crises, what might help to prevent them, and what lessons could be drawn from the analysis. This approach allowed participants to explore crises not in isolation, but as part of broader, multi-systemic interactions.
Group Work: The Polycrisis Toolkit
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One group identified the following risks: civil war within the EU, foreign interference, and migration, while others selected the loss of green technology leadership, a slow pace of innovation, and armed conflict. One group linked slow innovation to higher energy costs, which were also mapped as a consequence of the loss of EU leadership in green technologies. After exploring the outcomes of each risk, their impacts were discussed in relation to other crisis-related effects and how these could mutually reinforce one another. The pace of thinking was fast, and students were quickly able to connect different risk and underpinning loops.
Students noted that the exercise encouraged a way of thinking not common in their prior education, and that helped them connect various focus areas in pratical and applied ways. Rather than analysing each crisis in isolation, they found themselves tracing connections across domains and disciplines. The overlapping Futures Wheels, as Alexander Milonakis (BSc Economics) put it, were valuable precisely for highlighting “specific areas of intersection between crises”. In his view, this encouraged a mode of thinking that “better informs policy.” Others, like Cosima Wiltshire (BSc Politics and International Relations), noted a shift not just in method but in orientation, finding that the exercise brought discussions “from the more abstract to the more tangible” and reframed how they approached uncertainty itself.
Where crises might otherwise appear uniformly threatening, the structured analysis opened space to recognise, as Carlos Rangel (Bachelor of Arts and Science) observed, that “it’s not just negative”, that there are always opportunities embedded in disruption that policymakers must be prepared to identify and leverage. Perhaps most tellingly, several participants reported that discussions did not end with the session, continuing among peers in the days that followed, particularly around the long-term implications of AI and technological fragmentation, a point noted by Angelica Bidlack (BSc Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). The exercise generating this sustained engagement across students from Economics, Philosophy, Politics, and History speaks to both, the students felt, the accessibility of the toolkit and the appetite among the next generation of policymakers for more integrative, futures-oriented ways of thinking.
By mapping interrelated dynamics, reflections shifted towards exploring and identifying what is already happening that contributes to or counteracts these dynamics, as well as the lessons and key insights that can be drawn. This final component of the exercise links current dynamics to policy recommendations by extending them into an exploration of future trajectories. It also trains students not only to identify current issues but to connect them to actions with mapped impacts on the future.
The imperative to address emerging policy challenges calls for a shift in policy training, one that expands existing approaches to conceptualising “unknown unknowns” alongside “unknown knowns,” and to exploring the dynamics that may arise from their realisation. Strategic foresight offers a way forward, and its flexibility enables engagement with a plurality of policy questions and forms of evaluation. Foresight training in tertiary education must also be connected to current practices in how policymakers approach future thinking, to bridge the persistent gap between scholarship, and policy practice.
Valentina Amuso is Associate Professor at UCL’s School of Public Policy.
Cici Chen is a final -year BSc Politics and International Relations student at UCL, and Head of Events at the UCL Diplomacy Society.
Kohen Heng is a final-year BSc Politics and International Relations student at UCL, and Head of Events at the UCL Diplomacy Society.
Note: The views expressed in this post are those of the authors, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.
Image: Wind turbines near Oostende, Belgium, by Jesse De Meulenaere on Unsplash.
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