Foresight as a space of possibilities: why Europe needs territorial futures

May 2026

The way we talk about the future reveals a lot. Rarely is it about where we want to go. More often than not, it is about what we hope to avoid. The dominant narratives oscillate between urgency and pessimism, focusing on polycrises, geopolitical tensions, climate shocks and technological disruption. Even in policy and strategy, the future is framed as something to be managed, mitigated or survived rather than shaped.

Over the past year and a half, we have published a series of blog posts on scenarios, visions and foresight (Si apre in una nuova finestra). We have explored positive future narratives for Europe, territorial scenarios along its eastern borders, energy transitions, anticipatory governance and the deeper question of the kind of Union we want to be. Looking back, a pattern emerges;  not one that we planned, but one that is worth highlighting.

This post draws these threads together. Not as a conclusion, but as a stepping stone.

The problem with the futures we imagine

Much futures thinking, including our own at times, focuses on threats. We catalogue risks, map vulnerabilities and issue warnings about tipping points. These exercises are necessary. However, they carry a hidden cost: they stifle imagination. When we frame every future as something to avoid, we lose sight of what we are building towards. The future becomes a negation of the present rather than a genuine alternative.

This is more than an aesthetic concern. Without a positive vision – however provisional or contested – transitions lose their direction. People and institutions respond reactively to threats, prioritising short-term survival over long-term flourishing. The result is what we called the 'tyranny of the short term' in an earlier post: election cycles, programming periods and political rhythms that bear no resemblance to the time horizons in which the consequences of today's decisions will actually play out. The houses we build now will still define the built environment in 2100. The infrastructure decisions we make this decade will shape mobility and energy systems for fifty years. Yet most governance operates on rhythms of three to seven years.

Foresight is the antidote to this, at its best. Not because it predicts the future, but because it broadens the range of possible futures. It makes more possibilities thinkable. This, in turn, makes better choices more likely.

The future always has a postcode

Perhaps the most consistent insight throughout our future blog posts is one that sounds simple, yet is radical in practice: futures are not abstract. They have a real-world impact. They play out differently in an industrial region of the Danube basin than in a coastal tourism economy of the Adriatic. They have different implications for Narva and Lappeenranta, even when both cities face the same geopolitical scenario. Different winners and losers emerge depending on where grids are built, where data centres are located, and where carbon storage infrastructure is placed.

As we have repeatedly argued, a scenario without a postcode is half a scenario. The territorial dimension is not an additional complication. It is the substance. When Shell's energy scenarios depict a world shaped by AI, modular electrification, and carbon management, the fundamental policy questions become spatial: which regions will benefit from the transition, and which will be left with stranded assets? When Europe debates its eastern border, the question is not just geopolitical. It concerns the lived reality of communities in Latgale, Ida-Viru, Utenos and similar places that will experience very different futures depending on choices made far from them.

This is why territorial foresight matters. It connects possible futures to real places, economies and communities. It asks not just what might happen, but what it would mean for these places. It reveals something that spatially blind analysis consistently misses. Europe's territorial diversity is not a coordination problem. It is a source of resilience. Multiple transition pathways, redundancy in critical systems and the capacity to adapt strategies to different geographical and socio-economic contexts are strengths, not complications, provided they are recognised and governed as such.

Uncertainty is not the enemy

There is a widespread assumption, rarely stated but deeply embedded in policy culture, that uncertainty is a problem to be solved. The idea is that if we gather enough evidence, run enough models and consult enough experts, we can make the future more manageable. This assumption is understandable. However, in an era of polycrises and nonlinear change, it is also increasingly untenable.

The deeper challenge, as we discussed in our post on anticipatory governance, is cognitive. Institutions and individuals cling to familiar assumptions, resisting uncomfortable scenarios and avoiding possibilities that feel politically inconvenient. This cognitive inertia is arguably one of the most underestimated obstacles to long-term planning. It is not ignorance that prevents good foresight. Rather, it is the very human tendency to protect familiar mental models from disruption.

Genuine foresight does not promise certainty. Rather, it builds the capacity to navigate uncertainty with more confidence. It encourages policymakers to consider possibilities that may seem improbable today, but which could become urgent issues tomorrow. Paradoxically, the more uncomfortable a scenario initially feels, the more useful it often turns out to be, as it reveals our blind spots.

This is also why playful formats are more important than they might seem. Role plays, scenario exercises and citizens' labs are not just soft add-ons to serious analysis. They create environments in which people can explore unfamiliar futures without political risk, often arriving at insights that conventional workshops never reach. Some of our most productive foresight moments have come from these settings exactly.

Positive narratives are not naïve, but strategic

The desirable futures blog posts – the European island of happiness, the democratic spring, the rediscovery of local responsibility and the escape from post-truth narratives – is based on the deliberate belief that imagining what we want is at least as important as documenting what we fear.

This is a strategic choice, and not wishful thinking. Transitions without direction tend to reproduce existing inequalities. Investment flows to where the vision is clearest. Communities that can articulate a shared vision of their desired future are better positioned to influence it than those whose focus is solely on managing threats.

The EU's own narrative challenge reflects this. Traditional narratives, such as Europe as a peace project or a standard-setting economic superpower, are increasingly being challenged. These narratives were developed for a different era. What could replace them? We have explored several possibilities, including a resilience union that grows outwards from territories, a democratic spring project that renews participation at local and regional levels, and a steward of shared open futures that governs complexity through trust and transparency rather than control. None of these is a complete solution. However, together, they highlight something important: the EU's credibility in an uncertain world hinges less on new instruments than on its capacity to provide a compelling and authentic narrative of its purpose.

Trust is the ground condition

Territorial foresight, anticipatory governance and positive narratives all rest on a foundation that is easy to take for granted and difficult to rebuild once lost. Trust.

The eastern border scenarios illustrate this most starkly. Economic opportunity, EU investment and even geopolitical détente do not translate into genuine resilience without civic trust, whether between citizens and institutions, majority and minority communities or neighbouring states. The post-truth challenge that we explored in the context of a possible European factfulness AI represents the same problem viewed from a different angle. Without a sufficiently shared basis of facts and reliable sources, the collective conversation that foresight depends on becomes impossible. Opinion drowns evidence, and imagination narrows.

Building trust is not something we can defer until after the transitions are complete. It is part of the work itself: This means transparent governance, inclusive participation and honest communication about uncertainty and trade-offs. These are the foundations of any future worth having.

Spaces of possibility

So, ultimately, what is foresight for?

Not prediction. Nor is it for producing the single correct path forward. Rather, it is about opening up spaces of possibility, broadening the range of potential futures that institutions, communities, and citizens can consider, plan for, and choose from. It challenges the comfortable assumption that the future will resemble a slightly modified version of the present. It reveals trade-offs that would otherwise remain hidden. It creates the conditions for collective learning about the challenges that places might face and how they might evolve.

These spaces of possibility are not discovered. They must be constructed through a combination of evidence and imagination, territorial knowledge and lateral thinking, and the patient work of facilitating genuine dialogue between diverse individuals about shared futures that they may not yet know how to discuss together.

Europe cannot drift into the future. It must deliberately choose its pathways, territory by territory, community by community, and decision by decision. The tools are available. The methods are being developed and tested. What is needed now is the political and civic will to use them, and the imagination to believe that the futures we build together can be better than those that will simply befall us if we do nothing.

What are your thoughts? Which futures would you like to explore for your area, community or region? We invite you to join the conversation.

by Kai Böhme

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)