Foresight and Politics. Or What Politicians have Taught me about Foresight Studies

Like foresight and strategy, foresight and politics make excellent bedfellows. They can barely do without each other. And yet, in this column, Jacques de Courson sets out to be determinedly provocative. Asserting first that “foresight and politics no longer… have anything to say to each other”, he stresses the disrepute into which foresight can be said to have fallen as a result of its experts’ short-sightedness and, above all, of the cult of urgency currently afflicting our elected representatives. However, Jacques de Courson then explains why foresight and politics have to work together, given the degree to which politicians need effectively to anticipate events (exploratory foresight) and to be driven by a project, a vision of a desirable future or even to present themselves as the architects of a better one (unless they are merely to tell stories designed to bemuse their electors). But Jacques de Courson also advises caution. Though the relationship between foresight and politics can be fertile, it can also lead to perverse practices. This is what happens when politics becomes mere spectacle and elected representatives mere “showmen”, when foresight studies are waylaid for purposes of entertainment — or even to bemuse the electorate — and politicians use them merely in order to strut the political stage.