Qu’est ce que la prospective ? Is Foresight Concerned Solely with the Long Term?

Foresight connects long-term thinking to action in the present or near future.

To inform decision-making that has long-term consequences, there may be very long-run timelines for foresight exploration. Environmental issues, for example, require thinking on time-scales commensurate with the life-cycles of ecosystems.

The relevant time-horizon depends on the pace at which the field in question evolves.

The experts of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) work on climate scenarios that run to 2100; the thinking of vehicle manufacturers on the future of transport has 10-15 year time-horizons; and many economic actors try to look forward two or three years to identify new markets.

In crisis situations, when short-term uncertainties are important, the foresight approach is used to shape thinking about what may be the relatively short-term future. In the case of the Covid-19 health crisis, for example, Futuribles constructed 18-month scenarios that were regularly reassessed and re-worked. When war broke out in Ukraine, foresight analyses were developed that had a 3-year time horizon. These exercises shed light on decisions that have to be taken by actors in a situation of multiple, interconnected uncertainties.

In no case does foresight thinking ever consist in imagining distant futures without thinking through the relevant developmental trajectories. It is about working on the articulation of timescales, conceiving the relations between highly inert phenomena and others that develop much more quickly.