Workshop 12:
Foresight and Participation (Part 2)
Friday 9 June at 13.15-14.45
Chair: Juha Kaskinen
Communicative Action in Regional Foresight: Towards a Communicative Foresight Serving the Deliberative Policy Process?
David Duchamp (Institute of Business Administration, Research centre: GREFIGE, Nancy 2 University, France), Stéphane Lea (Institute of Business Administration, Research Centre: GREGOR Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne University, France)
Participatory foresight methods, principally scenarios and future workshops, are increasingly used in Europe to respond to the democratic demands of the new local governance. However, the utilization of these methods is often prompted by a teleological rationality and doesn't sufficiently integrate the procedural rationality that it should follow to reinforce the legitimacy of public policies. This deficiency is caused by an overly technicist utilization of foresight methods which under-estimates the values and knowledge involved in the deliberative process. This deteriorates the stakeholders' trust in the policy process. This paper, on the basis of a synthesis of the main contributions of the communicative planning authors (Forester, Healey, Innes) and defenders of critical and emancipatory approaches to future studies (Sandberg, Slaughter), defines the theoretical and methodological foundations of a communicative foresight which is in direct filiation with the four fundamental principles of Habermas' theory of communicative action : comprehensibility, sincerity, truthfulness and legitimacy. Communicative foresight enables regional foresight to become a real integrative and deliberative process, which neglects neither analysis nor politics, and lays the premises of a strengthened acceptability of public action.
Aligning a Region with the 21st Century
Ruben Nelson (Creating Tomorrow Foundation and Foresight Canada, Canada)
What would you do if you become aware that:
- Ours is a rare time in history of profound long-term cultural change, evolution and transformation and that adaptability to new realities is the new overriding capacity needed by persons, families, organizations and regions.
- As with all human realities, success is not guaranteed and the outcomes of the process hang on the ways we understand and participate in the change.
- Sustainable success requires that a critical mass of community opinion leaders from all sectors come to understand the actual strategic requirements, threats and opportunities of the 21st Century.
- These insights are not well or widely-understood on your region. In fact, most citizens and their leaders are only prepared for an essentially familiar future; their focus is on more innovation as the key to the future.
- To make matters more interesting, no organization is dedicated to this work.
This session will tell the story of how some in Alberta, Canada have responded to this set of challenges from 1989 to today. The whole journey will be laid out — the intuitive insights, the appropriate responses, the bone-headed mistakes and the evolution of the work. Today, we have three closely-related organizations — a foundation, a think tank/research centre and a community for leadership development. If most things go well, we will reach a critical mass of citizens by 2012. The goal is for Albertans to be the world's first region to embrace the new project of aligning itself with the 21st Century.
SPIDER – Increasing regional competitiveness through futures research methods
Juha Kaskinen (Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku, Finland), Marko Ahvenainen (Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku, Finland)
There exists a strong generalized belief that knowledge, creativeness, innovativeness, human and social capital are going to be more and more significant factors of production, competitiveness and prosperity. From this point of view the SPIDER –project was aimed at studying, learning and promoting the regional competitiveness through futures research methods in three regions. The regions, explored by three research partner organizations, were Southwest Finland (Finland), Wallonia (Belgium), Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf (Germany).
From the beginning the basic principle of the Spider was not only to be a passive external evaluation of the regions but landing a research process among local actors in order to provide interaction in the field of actual action. That was done by using research methods like local action group workshops, expert seminars and Delphi survey.
Outputs of Spider are dealing with questions in the framework of rethinking regional performance in the knowledge society: What is characteristic of the region of knowledge? What would be the primary development goals and strategic action in order to advance the region of knowledge? What is the vision of regional innovation system; what are the visionary elements to be taken account, development obstacles to be solved and policies needed in pursuit of the vision?
The duration of the Spider project was 1.2.2004 - 31.3.2006 and it was funded by the European Commission's Regions of Knowledge Pilot Action Program (KnowReg).