📣 YouthDecide 2040 is looking for participants to join our regional workshops and co-create the future of European democracy!

Be part of a one-and-a-half-day immersive workshop where diverse voices come together to imagine and shape resilient, thriving European democracies.

🗣️💬 Through creative, participatory foresight activities, we will explore different visions of democracy in 2040—your perspective matters!

🧭 The wider, the better
Are you a European resident over 18? This call is for you!
We're fostering intergenerational discussions on the future of European democracy, centring youth voices (18-34).

🔓 The call for applications will remain open through May 2025. 

Delivering solutions for a more sustainable future

ISINNOVA provides research services and strategic consultancy to public and private actors pursuing sustainable visions, solutions, and policies.

Five Pillars of Our Approach

1. Anticipate – Apply systems thinking and foresight methodologies to identify emerging challenges, reveal interdependencies, and inform proactive, future-resilient strategies.

2. Integrate – Connect disciplines, sectors, and knowledge systems to foster richer analysis and tackle complex challenges holistically.

3. Align – Ensure research, innovation, and governance processes reflect the values, priorities, and needs of society through ethical, participatory, and responsible approaches.

4. Co-create – Engage diverse stakeholders — researchers, policymakers, citizens, and industry — in collaborative processes to design solutions that are inclusive, relevant, and impactful.

5. Transform – Drive systemic change by translating shared knowledge and co-created solutions into sustainable, scalable actions, supported by continuous assessment to ensure applicability, effectiveness, and long-term value.

Track Record

• 50+ years in the game (and counting).
• Involved in over 130 research projects (ISINNOVA designs, develops, and manages sector-specific & cross-sector EU and global projects)
• 15 staff members with multidisciplinary backgrounds (engineering, statistics, economics, politics, law, social sciences, computer science and media studies)
  

Supports the economic growth in South-East Europe by promoting innovative solutions and facilitating the transfer of technologies and know-how. 

The first organization in the South- East region to implement foresight methods to shape public policy.

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. 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. 

Preferred scenarios, and visions from YouthDecide 2040 will aim to inform research and innovation pathways. They will help ensure the alignment of future and ongoing research and innovation with the values and needs of the democratic societies within the EU that support their advancement. The YouthDecide 2040 consortium comprises 11 partners with research expertise in areas of democracy research, foresight, participatory deliberation, co-creation, strategy development, as well as partners working in youth representation and organization, democracy advocacy, design, and multimedia communication. The project duration is three years, until the end of 2027 and it has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101177438. 

The municipality of Diano Marina, a seaside town in the northwestern Liguria region of Italy, in collaboration with the National Research Council of Italy, has launched an initiative in 2022 called “I Venerdi della Conoscenza” (Fridays of Knowledge, hereafter VDC). Link to the webpage.

The awareness of the possible impacts of emerging technologies and global changes on the society and the economy, prompted the mayor of Diano Marina to ask a group of scientists to design and develop activities for involving local communities in reflection on the future.

The aim of VDC is to promote and structure a dialogue between young generations and decision makers, using science as an interface.

A Scientific Committee has identified different aspects to be addressed during meetings that engage the participants to access the state of the art, and discuss them. The ultimate goal of VDC is to involve the local community in becoming more informed and active in shaping the future, which is often regarded as distant from the territorial contexts, and which constitutes the basis of the foresight exercises. The Scientific Committee consists of a selection of the experts who coordinated the Science and Technology Foresight Project of the National Research Council. The involved scientists are a representation of high-level national and international communities.

Students and teachers from some high schools are involved in advance, in order to brief and prepare questions during the meetings. On scheduled Fridays, the Sala Consigliare of the municipality hosts approximately 100 citizens. Students open the debate with lectures identified the week before, then a moderator initiates a debate with the scientists to elaborate the main concepts and challenges on the selected topics. Open questions from the audience conclude the dialogue, which includes the local public authorities that are invited. The meeting are accessible via streaming for a wider participation.

Some of the topics also anticipated or were suggested by those identified by a project funded by the European Commission named the Eye of Europe, whose aim is to support the European decision makers to reflect on the research and innovation priorities through foresight processes.

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.  

Event takeaways:

The workshop offered a structured journey—reflecting on the past of liberal democracies, examining current research on key pillars like institutions, participation, and media, and exploring possible futures through the lens of four science fiction novels that imagine future democratic developments

• Senior scientist at “Our World in Data”, Bastian Herre gave an alarming as well as reconciling view into the deterioration of liberal democracies worldwide as well as in Europe. Yet, he pointed out that most of our present democracies are built on solid institutions and they are most likely to be resilient against internal and external attacks.
• Michel Debruyne of Beweging.net introduced results from comparative country research from the INVOLVE Democracy project. Among the factors stablizing liberal democracies long-term are the quality of trust in public institutions and policies as well as making participation possible for all citizens. However, when looking at public policies and social benefits, the picture is more ambiguous: while public health expenditure is considered a stabilizing factor, high expenditure in pensions might result in distrust. More definite in destabilizing democracy in a country are corruption and low quality of public transport.
• The RECLAIM project is researching the significance of expression of information disorder and democratic stability. The protection of the public sphere is identified as a cornerstone of democracy. Of similar importance are public service social media as well as a better regulation of social media companies. In his presentation Maximilian Conrad, University of Iceland, also pointed out the significance of the education factor, not only for children but also for adults, including science education and media literacy. Destabilizing factors are, among others, disruptive technologies, fragmented public spheres and distrust in traditional journalism and science.
• In the MeDeMAP presentation, Maren Beaufort, Austrian Academy of Sciences focused on the role of (social) media and stated that traditional information media and pluralism, thinking long-term and endorsing a culture of diversity are crucial in maintaining democratic values. Investigative journalism plays a special role as it uncovers corrupt activities and disguised the foes of democracy. What we cannot expect is a consensus in social media bubbles. Definitely destabilizing liberal democracies is the exclusion of citizens from discourses; and also the suppression of media as well as the lack of self-criticism within journalism. Still open are questions such as: How to prevent democracies dying at the hands of elected leaders—who subvert the very process that brought them to power.
• An outlook into diverse futures of democratic values was presented in the “Literary Quartet”, where four passionate readers of science fiction literature gave their interpretation of four different novels dedicated to the longevity of democratic life in the future. What we can learn from novel like Infomocracy (2016), The Lost Cause (2023), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and The Ministry for the Future (2020)? The discussion extracted visions of pluralist and diverse societies where humans can change their identity, experiment with new forms of governance in local communities, where central governments are resolved and where people find ways to cope with climate change by supporting each other.

This workshop is part of a series of “Eye of Europe” pilot activities taking place during 2025, aimed at exploring various futures and their implications for R&I policy.

The workshop was open to a wide audience - experts and non-experts - interested in questions of future democracies.

This is the short English-language Policy Brief from the research project Foresight and Future Generations in Law-Making (FORGE). FORGE examined issues of future-regarding lawmaking in an interdisciplinary manner, combining expertise on futures studies, political science, and jurisprudence. The aim of the study was to analyse the status of future generations and their rights in current legislative processes, and to map and compare practices for foresight and consideration of future generations in different political contexts, nationally and internationally. The purpose of the project was to increase understanding on i) how future generations can be better taken into account in policymaking; ii) how foresight can be better utilised in lawmaking. 

The FORGE-project was unique – there had not previously been a study with a similar scope in Finland and comparable international examples are, to the best knowledge of the authors, extremely rare. FORGE supported the preparation of the second part
of the Government Report on the Future. The project was funded by the Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities (VN TEAS) and was conducted during 1/2022–11/2022 by researchers of the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University and Tampere University.

Findings:

From an international comparison, Finland already has an advanced national foresight system and can be regarded as a pioneer in futureregarding policymaking. However, there is still room for improvement in terms of using foresight and considering future generations as a part of lawmaking. Such improvement could be achieved by developing and upgrading the existing institutions and practices and by making more incremental changes in practices, modes of interaction, and attitudes. For example, foresight should be conducted more as a continuous activity, and future generations’ interests and rights should be considered more systematically in legislative processes, while acknowledging the plurality of future interests.

Development proposals:

Full lenght-report available in Finnish

In addition to the 12-page Policy Brief summarising the FORGE projects' finding in English, The Prime Minister's Office has published the full 203-page report in Finnish. This can be found here below.

The research project Foresight and Future Generations in Law-Making (FORGE) examined issues of future-regarding lawmaking in an interdisciplinary manner, combining expertise on futures studies, political science, and jurisprudence. The aim of the study was to analyse the status of future generations and their rights in current legislative processes, and to map and compare practices for foresight and consideration of future generations in different political contexts, nationally and internationally. The purpose of the project was to increase understanding on i) how future generations can be better taken into account in policymaking; ii) how foresight can be better utilised in lawmaking. FORGE’s conceptual and analytical structure is pictured in the figure 1.

The FORGE-project is unique – there has not previously been a study with a similar scope in Finland and comparable international examples are, to the best knowledge of the authors, extremely rare. FORGE supported the preparation of the second part of the Government Report on the Future. The project was funded by the Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities (VN TEAS) and was conducted during 1/2022–11/2022 by researchers of the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University and Tampere University.

I had the privilege to participate in a democracy conference and hackathon in Moldova in October, just days before the country’s pivotal EU referendum and presidential elections. Organized by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation in collaboration with local partner Yep Moldova and supported by USAID and the New Democracy Fund, the event was a hub of creativity, democratic innovation and a dose of foresight.

A journey in participatory democracy through challenges (and opportunities) of future-thinking approaches.

Social media provides a window into current debates, social issues and topics that are relevant to communities. This blog post summarises EUARENAS future-thinking work that used social media signals as its starting point to explore the future of democracy.

The establishment of responsible innovation requires four key institutional changes. First, innovation must be value-driven. Second, an ethics of co-responsibility among stakeholders must be implemented. Third, innovation should be made directional and manageable. Fourth, market failures need to be addressed to facilitate necessary transformative changes, especially with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This research project will take into account the evolution of Living Labs and various specialized Living Labs (e.g., urban labs, social labs, and responsible Living Labs) to assess to what extent they address these institutional requirements. On this basis, the concept of a new dedicated Living Lab: a Responsible Research and Innovation Lab for Engineering Practices will be introduced. Subsequently this dedicated Living Lab will be operationalised on a theme from the engineering sciences. We will consider innovations stemming from digital tech for Health issues, additive manufacturing or other engineering pratices. We will deploy participatory foresight, to enable a form of anticipatory governance of emerging new innovations.

This dedicated ling lab is contextualised in a broader context of a deliberative democracy: Living Labs can be seen as spaces for Organisational Learning and Collective Experimentation:Living Labs: ‘real-life test and experimentation environments that foster co-creation and open innovation among the main actors of the Quadruple Helix Model, namely: Citizens, Governmental Organisations, Industrial organisations and Academia’ (ENoLL 2024)It operationalises an important feature of Responsible Research and Innovation: Making stakeholders co-responsible and mutually responsive to each other by engaging them in an open co-creation/ co-enquiry process. (among other on the basis of participatory foresight of emerging technologies and innovations)The idea of 'openess' and 'mutual reponsiveness' as values of actors and institutions will also be subject of analysis.Science and innovation can be better fostered in an open, democratic society than in other types of societies. The norm of civic participation in a ‘democracy’ is a lived ideal for citizens, just as the norm of ‘communalism’ is a lived ideal for the scientific community. Both norms presuppose the values of ‘openness’ and 'mutual responsiveness' among scientist and citizens.This highlights ‘openness’ not as a prescriptive norm but as a value of the institution of science. Simultaneously, ‘openness’ is also an institutional value of a democracy. However, science and democracy are dependent on the extent to which scientist and citizens engage on the basis of these norms. How can we best encourage and incentivise those?

Democracy across Europe has experienced immense challenge, change and uncertainty in recent years (Canal 2014; European Commission & Merkel; 2019) - from the rise of populism to decreasing levels of public trust in governance institutions and processes, to the war in Ukraine. Set against the backdrop of these issues, EUARENAS has been investigating how cities and urban spaces can strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. Specifically, EUARENAS has been exploring how participation and deliberation in democracy and decision-making can be increased, and how voices and communities who are excluded from such arenas can be more actively involved.

Foresight is one of the research strands present in EUARENAS. In this project, foresight is both a tool for understanding democratic innovations as they emerge, and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations within the participatory and deliberative realms. Mixed method approaches to foresight that incorporate a diversity of activities such as media discourse analysis, lived experience storytelling, social media analysis, three horizons mapping, driver-mapping, scenario and visioning exercises and policy stress- testing have been used in EUARENAS to investigate and hypothesise over future trends and scenarios in participatory democracies. 

From this work, we propose the following recommendations for Cities wanting to strive towards more equitable local democracies:

1. Address structural barriers to participation
2. Build relationships of trust
3. Invest in formal and civic education
4. Make decisions for the long-term

A more equitable, inclusive local democracy landscape is not too far in the distance for us to conceive it being possible. In fact, the future is now – the seeds to create it are already being planted, they just need nurturing by:

• Scaling and mainstreaming existing pilot or niche practices that are working locally – whether that beparticipatory budgeting, citizen assemblies or other smaller-scale projects – so that these become thenew ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches to promote experimentation and on-going learning – this will enableongoing innovation and be responsive to society's needs
• Finding ways to celebrate and connect-up the small changes that are taking place - this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The Eye of Europe (EoE) project has reached an important milestone: Using an interactive approach, the members of the consortium came up with eleven exciting topics that will be addressed in Foresight Workshops with experts, citizens, entrepreneurs, scientists, policymakers, journalists and many other stakeholder groups within the coming 16 months. In the workshops, Eye of Europe partners will apply both established and novel Foresight approaches to dive deep into topics of common interest to stakeholders across the European Research Area. These workshops will take place in cities such as Madrid, Prague, Berlin, Bucharest, Paris and Thessaloniki, as well as online.

The final set of topics for EoE pilot workshops is as follows:

• Democracy – a long term Project: This online workshop will gather domain experts to shed light on a large spectrum of future challenges to democracy.
• The Knowledge of our Civilisation(s) in 2040: In this two-day Berlin based workshop participants with diverse domain expertise will explore the future of knowledge in human civilisation in the face of multiple drivers of change.
• European Industrial Decarbonisation: This two-day workshop in Madrid will gather diverse stakeholders to debate alternative pathways of industrial decarbonisation for Europe in the face of different geopolitical scenarios.
• Emotion Ecosystems: This Bucharest based two-day workshop will investigate the impact of technologies like affective computing and brain-machine interface on individuals and collectives with different stakeholder groups.
• Democracy and Technology: In this workshop citizens in Prague will jointly reflect on democratic approaches to risks connected with new technologies and their impacts on various societal groups.
• Aging and Assisted Living Technologies: This workshop in Berlin with international research and policy actors is dedicated to future ways of integrating smart and digital technologies into assisted living and care for older adults.
• Fashion Futures: In two Thessaloniki based workshops citizens and domain experts will explore the future of sustainable fashion in interaction with values and identities both with a regional and international perspective.
• Public Policy and Change of Diets: In this workshop in Paris a diverse group of citizens will reflect on policy inroads into future pathways towards healthy and sustainable diets.
• Science and Conflicts: In this online workshop, experts and actors of the science system will jointly dive into possible implications of growing geopolitical tensions for science.
• Future of Knowledge and Emotions: This futures survey will provide input for the two interrelated topics the future of knowledge and the future of emotion ecosystems that will feed the respective workshops.
  
  
  These Eye of Europe Foresight pilot workshops have a twofold purpose.
  
  First of all, the workshops serve the project’s aspirations expressed by Eye of Europe coordinator, Radu Gheorghiu, namely to nurture the “vibrant community of individuals engaging in a conversation about our collective future” and to fuel the “continuous loop of dialogue, learning and inspiration”.
  
  Secondly, by addressing topics of common interest to R&I actors across ERA and major R&I challenges, they aim to mobilise collective anticipatory intelligence. In particular, we hope to shed light on the evolution of research and innovation and its contribution to a wide range of important future questions.
  
  How did the team arrive at these topics?
  
  The topic generation process involved three major elements:
  
• Analysis of R&I strategy documents from a range of different EU countries
• interviews with R&I actors from different positions in ERA’s research and innovation ecosystem,
• and interactive discourse among EoE partner organisations.
  
  It was important to the topic identification team, led by Pier Francesco Moretti from CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy, not to remain at the surface of the challenges that are expressed in key documents but to dive deeper into underlying root causes and dynamics. So when in the document analysis, topics like energy, artificial intelligence, digitalisation, health and security emerged at top positions, we strived to identify crosscutting underlying aspects.

#OurFutures invites people across the EU to share their imagined futures.

The project supports and inspires a collective dialogue about the future of Europe and its visions for the future. 

We welcome your short story expressing what you would like to see in the Europe of the future, making explicit your hopes, aspirations, but also uncertainties.

The visions you and other citizens submit will be analysed and shared with EU policy makers. We will look for early signs of potentially important developments, persistent problems, novel and unexpected issues. These outcomes will serve to generate actual, future-oriented recommendations for EU action to build together the Europe that we want.

The future is a co-creation. Share your visions of tomorrow and join us in creating a narrative that inspires citizens, policymakers, and foresight experts:

• Write your future story and answer a few questions - share your preferred future with the rest of the world. Allow your vision to inspire others and fuel a meaningful conversation across Europe.
    
• Take a look at the #ourfutures dashboard - explore future visions shared by hundreds of contributors and check out stats and graphs that synthetise this rich content.