Citizen visions for European futures—methodological considerations and implications

Abstract

In recent years, citizen involvement has been increasingly recognised as a source of complementary insights to expert-based foresight. This article analyses citizen visions on desirable and sustainable futures gathered in three recent European involvement projects and reviews how the methodology of topic modelling can be applied to identify commonalities in the visions and how the identified topics are distributed across the citizen involvement projects. A common topic addressing a European citizen desire for wide-ranging societal development with an emphasis on education was identified in the modelling. In addition, three specific topics that correspond to the foci of each involvement project were evident: ‘local production’, ‘cultural variety’ and ‘concerned collectives’. Hence, the results indicate that there are further opportunities for further citizen involvement activities and that specifically focused open-ended envisioning events can contribute to unique sets of citizen-induced topics for the future. These results are particularly useful for the institutionalisation of citizen involvement in foresight studies.