The Foresight Bridge workshop, which took place in Brussels (Belgium) on 6th July 2004, is an initiative stemming from the ForeTech project supported under the STRATA Programme of the European Commission. The workshop was organized by ARC Fund, as ForeTech project coordinator, with the support of the Commission and the project consortium partners. The objective of the Foresight Bridge is to network the new member states and the candidate countries, ensure long-term sustainability of foresight initiatives, and develop a critical mass in foresight.
As a major milestone of the workshop a number of new ideas were elicited with a view to meeting the foresight needs common for the participant countries and addressing future challenges through present-day decisions. The overall aim behind the new ideas was to inform both national and EU policy.
The participants in the workshop came from the following candidate countries, new member states and EU members: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Malta, Estonia, Cyprus, United Kingdom, Greece, Germany, Denmark, and Belgium.
A nucleus of foresight capacities within the new member and accession states began to be built through a number of EU supported initiatives, notably ForeTech, eFORESEE, and the Regional Foresight Blueprints Group, not to mention the training activities of the European Foresight Academy and the Enlargement Futures work of the Joint Research Centre – Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS). The ForeTech and eFORESEE projects, in particular, represented attempts to develop and embed foresight capacity. Funded under the FP5 STRATA programme, these projects involved the organisation of pilot foresight exercises in Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Malta, and Cyprus.
The keynote speaker Mr. Paraskevas Caracostas, Head of Unit K2, DG Research, opened the workshop, outlining the perspectives for new foresight-related initiatives aimed to inform both national and EU policies. Mr. Elie Faroult, from the same unit, drew emphasis on EU’s need of a coherent European vision for structuring the foresight activities at national and regional levels. Networking, exchange of experience and inter-regional cooperation were regarded to have key role in both national and regional foresight initiatives. The lack of explicit measures and methods of “how-to-do” and put outcomes and recommendations into practice was considered to be a major drawback of recent and current foresight activities. Through brainstorming a number of Europe-wide challenges were elicited to be responded to through foresight as a policy making tool that involves a large number of actors and ensures coherency in policies and strategies at European, supra-national and national level.
The presentations of the speakers are available here:
Mr. Christian Swanfeldt
Ms. Zoya Damianova
Mr. Patrick Crehan
Mr. Ferenc Kovats
Mr. Luke Georghiou
