This foresight study aimed at supporting the development of the Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe (2025-2027), by providing early-stage strategic intelligence and sense-making contributions – issues, trends, perspectives, ideas - that could contribute novel elements to the processes of strategic planning.
Global and European contexts: the playing fields for future disruptions
Multi-level context scenarios represent alternative perspectives on the global and European context of EU R&I policy. Six multi-level context scenarios distinguish conditions at the global level ranging from a world of genuine collaboration to one of open hostility. As regards the European level, a dynamic and resilient EU is contrasted with a declining, destabilised and vulnerable EU.
Disruptive areas
Focusing on a time horizon of 2040, eleven areas of disruption were explored and analysed, grouped into four clusters (figure 2): i) the global landscape, ii) technology and society, iii) society and nature, iv) social and value changes. In most cases, the explorations of the disruptions included scenario-making, which generated important insights in how specific challenges may evolve in the future and what implications this may raise for R&I policy.
In each of these areas of disruption relatively detailed descriptions of possible futures were developed aiming to draw R&I policy implications. Considering those possible futures, a survey was launched to elicit expert views as to important R&I agendas that could be addressed at the European level. Below we summarize implications for strategy and instrumentation and provide the top agendas for R&I according to the results of the survey.
Normative (re)orientations for EU Strategy
Strengthening technological and industrial leadership of the EU has been the overarching normative ambition underpinning EU R&I policy over the past decade, complemented more recently by the goal of addressing major societal challenges in general, the ‘twin’ green and digital transition in particular.
Leadership: Future disruptions will create novel playing fields that offer the opportunity for Europe to position itself in a pioneering and leading role, which – in some areas – may be temporary only, but in others may lead to the consolidation of new and deeply embedded ecosystems in Europe. Achieving a leading position requires concentrating funding and investment as well as defining reliable regulatory frameworks. Maintaining leadership is as important a challenge as achieving it.
Beyond leadership, towards improving global governance: Balancing appropriately the global commons character of science, the contributions of EU science to the governance of other global commons and the concerns with Europe’s security and competitiveness is likely to become a more intensely felt challenge in EU R&I policy. Several of the areas of disruption explored have shown that it is necessary to improve global governance, and the increasing use of science for this purpose is an unfolding trend. Science for global governance is an important global commons in which Europe still holds an important position. Europe’s performance in races for technological leadership is not commensurate to its scientific standing, and this places Europe at less advantageous positions in global negotiations about regulating emerging technology. In the evolving geopolitical reconfigurations, there is a concern about the rise of security concerns and that Europe’s scientific performance may need to be more tightly coupled to security.
Resilience to crises: Strengthening resilience to crises is likely to continue to be an important issue whether crises originate in climate change, environmental and resource issues, geopolitical competition, runaway technology, social rifts and confrontations, evolving health threats or combinations thereof. Preparedness and agility are important to contain and prevent crises. Intelligence and rapid response capabilities as well as stability of supply and reliability of value chains gain in importance as opposed to opportunism and short-term optimisation. The response to such threats must involve scientifically informed, principled public debate, and having spaces and practices for such debate is a very important foundation for resilience.
Reflexivity towards new frontiers: Where research into science and technology increasingly breaches new frontiers, developments are often contested, uncertain and potentially highly impactful. Climate engineering, transhumanism and human enhancement, and Artificial General Intelligence are but some such areas that require broad societal deliberation around the pursuits and conditions for public research, as well as about responsibilities and liabilities for direct and indirect effects of using emerging technologies. Broad societal deliberations need to be early and find an appropriate balance between the call for precaution and the importance of risk taking and innovation.
Reframing the relationship between nature and society: Human life affects nature in ways that influence the prospects of other species to flourish, and through this process human society exposes natural ecosystems to major risks. There are important pressures to broaden and reframe the relationship between nature and society, from a resource to individual humans, to a common good or even as an ecology in which humans exist in partnership with other beings and embrace a stewardship role for nature. There are important R&I agendas associated with different ways of valuing nature and humans influences that need to be represented in public R&I programmes alongside the technological priorities of nature-exploiting industries.
Roles and instruments of EU R&I policy
The potential for disruptions raises issues about the suitability of the current programmes and instruments of European R&I policy.
The need for more open instruments: All disruptive areas considered are characterised by significant levels of uncertainty and complexity, making it important to cater for different views of the “problem-solution” space in the programmes, with more open instruments to be deployed not only in exploratory frontier research, but also in more targeted research addressing grand challenges. Openness and involvement of a wider range of actors is needed in programme governance and in the definition of the R&I agenda, which needs flexibility in its implementation.
The criticality of time: Speed and time are critical in addressing disruptive areas. R&I programmes need to foresee corrective reflexive mechanisms to trace, learn about and adjust to, new insights into disruptions, in particular when critical and contested societal and ethical issues are at stake. This holds both for those areas where the pace of change is very high and for others that unfold more slowly, but where inertia, uncertainty, and complexity of impacts on society, economy and the environment make timely action a must.
Global collaboration vs. preferential international collaboration: Most disruptive areas are shaped in arenas well beyond Europe. The extent to which EU positions can be brought to bear hinges, in some cases, upon collaboration with selected partners sharing similar concerns, strategic interests and values (e.g., the US, Japan, South Korea, Australia as well as some Latin American, African and Near/Middle East countries). In other cases, truly global collaboration is needed to establish common rules. Whereas the UN’s IPCC has been quite successful in shaping agendas and triggering action, other areas of disruption, such as global commons or Artificial General Intelligence, have not been addressed with the necessary urgency and prominence yet. A differentiated approach to collaborative ties with non-European partners can be based on EU strengths and a good understanding of common European and corresponding national interests in the different areas of disruption.
Programming capacities and capabilities: To overcome the challenges of openness, time and collaboration, programme management needs to be highly sensitive to alternative agendas, involving open deliberation processes, and organising the levels of consensus-building required to advance directionally in the face of contestation and disruptions. This is even more so considering the reliance on capacities of Member States. Strategic planning at the EU level should be an integral part of strategic programming across the European Research Area.
Priority topics
The table below contains a sample of the top preferences of the expert survey on important R&I agendas for the EU for each area of disruption.
