The 4th Meeting of the Government Foresight Organisations Network (GFN) on 19-20 November 2013 was organised by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) in Brussels.
In 2009 the UK Foresight Programme launched the Government Foresight Organisations Network (GFN) aiming at bringing together government foresight experts. The meeting provided an opportunity for governmental organisations to discuss global emerging issues requiring policy action and exchange experiences in horizon scanning and foresight.
The meeting was attended by high-ranking representatives from the Commission, the Member States, governmental foresight organisations from around the world and international organisations with foresight capacity.
It aimed at strengthening GFN alternating plenary and working group sessions on four issues:
- Emerging global socio-economic challenges requiring policy actions
- Learning from foresight practice to unlock the future for policy making
- Improve horizon scanning and foresight practice
- Improving international collaboration in foresight and horizon scanning
The newly appointed Director of the EC-Joint Research Centre, Vladimir Sucha, identified four major threats to foresight and systemic thinking.
- Tendency to normalize, and in particular working with averages which are not the reality.
- Tendency to linearity, linear thinking and extrapolation being the “best” enemies of complexity.
- Separating results from process, whereas process itself is often the result, and without process there is no result.
- Separating what is technological and non-technological, i.e. not thinking systemically.
On behalf of GFAR, Robin Bourgeois, Senior Foresight and Development Policies Expert, offered to link the Forward Thinking Platform to the GFN with the perspective of mutual sharing of information and collaborative action in fields of common interest. This includes in particular the current work on a common corpus of definition, and the participation to a conference on agricultural technology.
He also pushed for GFN to engage in a joint forward looking initiative on the future of trust as this is a topic that will have implications for the future of agriculture and food security, as well as how consumers and producers link to the wider systems and institutions shaping their environment.
The meeting concluded by the identification of a set of actions in related to these different issues with commitments from members (lead and/or contribute).
Photo credit: ©FAO/Christena Dowsett