Towards Foresight 3.0: The HCSS Metafore Approach—A Multilingual Approach for Exploring Global Foresights

Abstract

The policymaking community puts ever more emphasis on basing policy on rigorously collected and curated objective evidence (‘evidence-based policy’). But what is the equivalent for the future of what ‘evidence’ is for the past and present? This paper presents some examples of what we call ‘Foresight 3.0’: an attempt to distil more insights about the entire futurespace by systematically collecting, parsing, visualizing and analysing a large database with elements of the future (futuribles) as they are perceived across the globe. This global ‘futurebase’ allows policy analysts and policymakers to gauge the bandwidth of views on these futuribles across different constituencies (and different languages and cultures). The hope is that such an approach will allow us to transcend some of the widely acknowledged bias problems with many current approaches to foresight. This paper introduces one of the approaches The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies pursuing to move the current debate about foresight for strategic planning in more of a 3.0 direction: the HCSS Metafore approach. The paper briefly presents the main steps in the Metafore research protocol that was used in some recent HCSS work for the Dutch government’s ‘Strategic Monitor’, which tries to anticipate the future in the area of foreign, security and defence policy. The essence of the protocol is that we try to collect a much larger corpus of foresight studies in a particular field than has hitherto been possible and then code these with both manual (for the smaller sets) and semi-automated (for the larger sets) coding tools. The results are then visualized in different ways and analysed. We describe the protocol and provide some illustrative examples. The paper concludes by discussing some of the strengths and weaknesses of such a ‘Metafore’ approach for strategic policymaking.