The Civil Society Foresight Observatory has been seed-funded by The National Lottery Community Fund to:

• Show the process through which foresight practice can be combined with lived, learnt, and practice expertise[2]

• Test the feasibility of a shared Foresight Commons for civil society

• Understand how the Foresight Commons can become new infrastructure for civil society, funded by a network of funders

Our aim is to make visible some of the possible, plausible, and just futures that rarely surface in more traditional, top-down foresight, and make it easier for infrastructure communities, civil society, funders, and policymakers to actively shape and nurture alternatives through strategic interventions.

Careful Industries’ job in this initial six-month period is to prototype and test the Observatory and show what could be possible in a larger, collaborative programme of work. We are also publishing our findings throughout the project, building a shared resource so that others can use the tools and methods we develop along the way. 

See definitions

But how might the same scenarios look from the perspective of the workers powering supply chains in the context of climate hostility or delivering more productivity from the kitchen table? What might the aggregate picture look like if it considered the unpaid care work that happens in families and communities, the impact of Long Covid, or the context of global grief? The aim of relational foresight is to show how  some of these futures coexist, impact and affect one another and capture some of the texture of “a world where many worlds fit”.[9]    

By working with civil society rather than directly with groups of citizens, our aim is to capture the early signs of systemic changes as they become audible to those who choose to listen.

This is intentionally different from participatory foresight practices that are more commonly deployed to work through shared social divisions and dilemmas, and which we discuss in more detail in Section 4. While this type of “bottom-up” public participation can be a democratic good, it is not always optimised to capture disparate weak signals. Multiple possible futures could be unfolding within any mini-public, but the emphasis on collaboration and consensus around clearly emerging and existing dilemmas is often a higher priority than capturing these shared and unfolding points of difference. 

This kind of "bottom-up" participatory practice also needs “official” permission to happen: mini-publics are often convened to deliberate on issues that can be observed or anticipated by those with traditional power, and so there is a limit to the possibility of opening up opportunities for alternative futures to arise. Rather than shaping "unofficial futures" to fit within the boundaries set by the perspectives and rhetoric of these dominant narratives, relational foresight pushes us to engage the space between "official" and "unofficial" futures and to expand the parameters of our considerations.

Translated from “un mondo donde quepan muchos mondos”: “The trope ‘A World Where Many Worlds Fit’ goes back to the Subcomandante Marcos, when talking about the Zapatistas’ struggles in the Lacandonian Rainforest in Mexico. Since their uprising in 1994 the Zapatistas have been fighting for a less-hierarchic autonomous world where more options exist for involvement in democratic decision-making processes."

“A WORLD WHERE MANY WORLDS FIT : COAL,” accessed August 7, 2021, http://www.projetcoal.org/coal/en/2010/01/22/a-world-where-many-worlds-fit/.

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