From foresight to welfare practices

Report on driving forces

One central aim of the futures studies is to help understand the future and to support planning and responsible decision making. In order to plan the next steps as individuals or as communities, we need to think of the world of tomorrow. With the help of methods of futures studies we can try to visualise the possible and probable futures as well as desired and non-desired development.
This report presents trends and driving forces which are a result of welfare foresight process of the Innosi project, which was implemented in ten European countries in 2016. The aim of the forecasting process was to test future thinking techniques in the context of European welfare policy.
The overall approach of the foresight process was positive and in presenting the trends the main attention is paid to describe the future solutions and possibilities with a positive tone but also remarks about possible challenges related to the phenomena have been made. Although in this report the nine identified trends are presented as separate narratives, it must be stated that they are strongly interconnected and interdependent. In today’s global, interconnected world, the interdependency of simultaneously affecting forces may lead to surprising consequences. It is often to almost impossible to deduce what is the cause and what is the effect.

To read the full report, please click here