Forward-looking policy-making at the European Parliament through scientific foresight

Briefing 31-08-2017

The European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel, supported by the Scientific Foresight Unit (STOA), decided two years ago to experiment with a process involving scenario development and assessment to explore possible future techno-scientific developments and their potential impacts, while backcasting possible future opportunities and concerns to options available to policy-makers today. This was achieved with the involvement of experts from a variety of backgrounds, together with stakeholders, using a multi-perspective approach. In this setting, various types of possible impacts are explored, which provide the foundations for imagined exploratory scenarios. From these scenarios we can learn about the possible challenges and opportunities arising from them. By communicating these challenges and opportunities to the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), together with related legal and ethical reflections, the MEPs are provided with potential insights into how to anticipate future policy issues. The MEPs might thus be able to identify options for working towards the most desirable futures and avoiding undesirable futures, and even for anticipating undesirable scenarios. Therefore, foresight-based policy preparation can help the European Parliament stay well prepared for what might lie ahead, allowing informed, anticipatory action.