By Patrick Van Zwanenberg, Adrian Ely, Andy Stirling

This background paper focuses on the potential role that international science and technology ‘foresight-type’ activities might play in informing decision-making processes about innovation, development and emerging technologies.

Two, predominantly national-level, foresight type activities are discussed, ‘technology foresight’ and ‘technology assessment’. Experiences with these approaches are quite diverse but over time there has been a discernible shift in many countries away from reductive and expert-based exercises to more plural processes in which wider sets of assumptions have been articulated about problems, desired futures and the social purposes of technology.

Foresight-type activities have only occasionally been conducted at the international level but this paper argues that there may be scope for conceiving of international foresight activities as a mechanism for articulating and framing development ‘needs’, and for
bringing these to bear on innovation actors. This would, however require considerable attention to how foresighttype
activities are designed and conducted, and the complexities of dealing with a very large array of global actors and perspectives.

Download Manifesto background paper – Foresight (pdf 551kb):

To view the PDF format documents on this site you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this free plug-in and would like it, click here to download it from the Adobe web site.