Foresight: A major tool in tackling sustainable development

Abstract

For many decades, the concept of sustainability has been highly successful in public policies and even in the business world. 1 1 See L. R. Brown, Building a Sustainable Society, Norton, New York, (1981) and G. MIinati, M.P. Penna, E. Pessa, A conceptual framework for self-organization and merging processes in social systems, in Systems For Sustainability, Plenum Press, New York, (1997). Nowadays, all initiatives must be sustainable and are primarily assessed on that criterion. However, the efforts made to construct specific methods dedicated to building sustainable strategies seem rather weak. Futurists themselves underestimate the relationship between sustainable development and foresight, even if they are talking about sustainable planning. 2 2 Sustainable planning integrates the objectives of economic development, social justice and inclusion, environment integrity and integrated transport. There is often conflict between short-term economic and fiscal benefits and the longer-term environmental and social implications arising from development. Cf. Ian Miles, Michaël Keenan Practical Guide to Regional Foresight in the United Kingdom, European Commission, DG Research, Brussels (2000) 18. They remain generally unaware that foresight could be a major tool in tackling sustainability as well as one of the best methods of preparing sustainable strategies and policies. Indeed, one of the biggest problems in sustainability approaches is the simplistic way used to define the concept, for instance, by using only the very first part of the 1987 the Bruntland report Our Common Future and by limiting the fields of activity on sustainability to the three pillars of the OECD model: economy, social questions, environment. At the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference (December 2009), it seemed forgotten that sustainability is already an old issue in which futurists were heavily involved at the time of the United Nations Stockholm Environment Conference (1972), in the Limits to Growth Report, published by the Club of Rome (1972) 3 3 D.L. Meadows, ed., Limits to growth, Earth Island Ltd, London (1972). and in the OECD Interfutures Foresight, spurred on by Jacques Lesourne (1978). 4 4 INTERFUTURS, Research project on the future development of advanced industrialised societies in harmony with that of developing countries, Final reports, Paris, OECD, 28 September 1978. Since that time (forty years ago!) researchers and consultants have learned how to deal with the concept of sustainability, how to analyze it as an ultimate aim for society as a whole as well as a complex object that needs to be approached with adequate methods such as systemic analysis. As Christian Stoffaës said, the aim of foresight is sustainable development in a changing world. As a result, the ultimate aim of strategic foresight appears to be clear: it is sustainability. This article highlights that fundamental relationship as we see it today. 5 5 C. Stoffaës, Les logiciels de la pérennité, in J. Lesourne and C. Stoffaës, Prospective stratégique d'entreprise, Dunod, Paris (2001) 25, 27.