Democracies in Europe have demonstrated resilience and modernisation in the face of various social and technological challenges. Democracy in the age of the Anthropocene will necessitate radical shifts in values, power relations and modes of governance, while also being built on the present, in all its diversity, paradox and insufficiency. Innovating to meet these challenges will require re-imagining how people living in democracies become equipped and supported to co-create resilient, democratic futures in Europe and beyond. Clear visions are needed to build strategies that allow for rethinking and redesigning spaces, institutions, instruments and ways to represent and include people in democratic governance. YouthDecide 2040 aims to support European Union democracy to rise to these challenges through evidence-based historical and contemporary knowledge, strategic foresight, and robust deliberation. 

Specifically, YouthDecide 2040 has the main objective to: co-create with European youth – and older generations, political and institutional actors, and organised civil society – coherent pathways to desired futures of democracy in the European Union in 2040. We translate our main objective into a series of research questions that need to be answered to support the work. Each question is connected to a key objective and corresponding work packages to support co-creation. The questions and objectives, presented below, are in order of workflow, not in order of importance. All activities are planned to be inclusive and open processes – transparently documented along the way – to enable repetition and implementation beyond the life of the project. The project’s ambition is to reinvigorate democracy in and across Europe with visions and pathways – made with active and inclusive citizen participation – for becoming more resilient to current and future challenges. 

GIZ Profile: sustainable development for a liveable future

As a service provider in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development and international education work, we are dedicated to shaping a future worth living around the world. We have over 50 years of experience in a wide variety of areas, including economic development and employment promotion, energy and the environment, and peace and security. The diverse expertise of our federal enterprise is in demand around the globe – from the German Government, European Union institutions, the United Nations, the private sector, and governments of other countries. We work with businesses, civil society actors and research institutions, fostering successful interaction between development policy and other policy fields and areas of activity. Our main commissioning party is the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

How GIZ uses Foresight Methods: As a federal enterprise working in the fields of international cooperation for sustainable development and international education, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH is greatly affected by the business environment in which it operates and by trends in Germany, Europe and the world. Dealing with the resulting uncertainty, complexity and fast-paced change is often very challenging. This makes it important for GIZ to understand the underlying drivers of change and possible future developments so that it can prepare for the future and for the crises it will have to address, ultimately making the company and its staff more resilient.  

The vision of FOSTER is to build a foundation from which a new Knowledge and Innovation System (KIS) for Europe’s food system can emerge. The current structure is insufficient to address the emerging challenges of nourishing people in a healthy and sustainable way. Key objective is to gain insights into how it can be built to be more inclusive and better governed. 

FOSTER shall help to transform Europe’s food system outcomes and will achieve this by: 

• building a FOSTER Platform including food system-state of the art knowledge, foresight by semi-automated Horizon scanning, trend and threats-analysis and new multi-dimensional scenarios of EU food systems to 2040; 
• implementing the FOSTER Academy – including four Summer Schools – for integrating food system-related disciplines and citizen science to enhance food system understanding across the ERA; 
• initiating and assessing a co-creation and co-learning process within six national resp. regional Citizen Driven Initiatives (CDIs), in which new knowledge, strategies and Action Research Agendas are gained; 
• scaling out and deep CDIs solutions and approaches to other territorial contexts; 
• studying different R&I mechanisms of policy support for mission-oriented R&I policy for food systems transformation, and analysing and ground-proofing them in each CDI; 
• strengthening science-policy interfaces by co-learning processes with external experts and developing recommendations for food systems R&I policies tailored to different geographies and sectors; 
• identifying the trigger points to help ‘unlock’ system lock-ins and support further dynamics towards system transformation; 
• and applying reflective monitoring on all FOSTER’s co-learning activities to develop insights into how the KIS can be broadened from an agricultural-KIS to a food system-KIS.
  

To inspire adoption of FOSTER learnings, over 20 workshops and a final conference will be conducted; scientific position papers and policy briefs will be widely communicated. 

The aim of the project was to identify global megatrends whose impacts have the potential to significantly influence current socio-economic processes in the city's strategic activities in the near future, and which will enable innovation in current ways of providing public services in Jihlava. The aim was also to initiate an expert discussion in Jihlava and to begin a real process of anticipating the impacts of potential development changes and their consequences for socio-economic development in the city. The assessment of the impact of megatrends was carried out in cooperation with regional experts within a series of consecutive foresight workshops. The project results serve as a basis for improving the coordination of activities and expanding cooperation between key regional actors, which will lead to the development of the business environment, the creation of innovations, the improvement of public administration and other activities falling within the competence of the city.

The project aims to establish an interdisciplinary research center, providing long-term expert capacity for socioeconomic environmental research. The center will develop methods for policy impact evaluation, foresight, and behavioral research and provide support to the MoE and public authorities in policy-making elaborating on the European Green Deal (GD) based on the research of current and expected impacts on the environment, the economy and society. The Center consists of 12 research institutions and universities with broad expertise.
Technology Centre Prague is respnsible for developing of foresight methods to identify new trends in the form of development scenarios to map transformation processes in society, research and technologies, constituting assumptions for the identification of current and future socioeconomic and environmental challenges and their impacts.

The project responded to a highly topical and significant need of public administration regarding the availability of timely and relevant information on dynamically developing technological and socio-economic changes for the strategic management of research and innovation policy. Very fast and dynamic changes and their possible impacts need to be predicted and responded to in a timely and flexible manner. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically monitor technological and social trends and identify in advance the resulting opportunities and potential threats to socio-economic development. The aim of the project was to develop a system for continuous monitoring and evaluation of technological trends and collection of signals associated with technological changes with a potential impact on the Czech economy and society. The project output is a unique horizon scanning tool in the Czech environment combining the latest methods in the field of data science with elements of expert assessment based on participatory methods used in prospective studies. The result of the project (and the newly created horizon scanning tool) is the ability to continuously identify and analyze emerging technological trends and emerging technologies and assess their impacts on the Czech economy and society. The expected impact of the project is to strengthen strategic management in public administration by a prospective component of monitoring the medium- and long-term horizon of technological and social development, thereby making the implementation of research and innovation policy in the Czech Republic more efficient.

The shift in China’s strategy focusing towards R&I and transforming the essence of its economy has been complimented with massive public investments in research and technology. In order to tackle critical global issues demanding close scientific and technological cooperation at an international level, EU has identified in China a natural partner able to contribute and complement its own capacity. Beginning of 2015, major European and Chinese Research & Academic organisations, Innovation intermediaries, Public Authorities, Funding agencies and SMEs have teamed up to provide an answer to this necessity and foster EU-China cooperation in the large spectrum of S&T RDI topics.

The report provides a brief overview of the insights captured during the second Mutual Learning Event (MLE2) which was held online on September 26, 2024.