New Emerging Issues and Wild Cards as Future Shakers and Shapers
Foresight and other forward-looking activities like scenarios, future modelling and planning all play an important role in anticipating future developments. Where appropriate, they are used not only to examine future options but also to shape developments
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New Emerging Issues and Wild Cards as Future Shakers and Shapers Victor van Rij
5.1
Introduction: The Unpredictable Aspects of the Future
Foresight and other forward-looking activities like scenarios, future modelling and planning all play an important role in anticipating future developments. Where appropriate, they are used not only to examine future options but also to shape developments more to our common will. On many occasions, these forward-looking activities fail, however, to anticipate what is referred to as ‘high-impact’ new emerging issues and wild cards because of their high unpredictability and uncertainty. Therefore, many countries have organized horizon-scanning1 activities that focus on the identification of high-impact issues and wild cards and their accompanying signals, in order to support more resilient policymaking. In 2007, an attempt was made to align and compare the results of the national horizon scans from three countries (Van Rij 2010); in these scans, the concepts of (new) emerging issues, wild cards and weak signals were used frequently. In several blue-sky projects that were set out by the EC, the role of these concepts was investigated in more detail. This chapter reports on the findings of the author who was involved in many of these projects and focuses on the role of ‘imaginary’ wild cards as instruments to shake and shape the future.
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‘Horizon scanning’ is the systematic examination of potential (future) problems, threats, opportunities and likely future developments, including those at the margins of current thinking and planning. Horizon scanning may explore novel and unexpected issues, as well as persistent problems, trends and weak signals.
V. van Rij (*) University of Amsterdam & Advisory Council for Science and Technology (AWT-The Hague), Basilicumhof 5, 1115, Duivendrecht, DK, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Giaoutzi and B. Sapio (eds.), Recent Developments in Foresight Methodologies, Complex Networks and Dynamic Systems 1, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5215-7_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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5.2
V. van Rij
(Potential) New Emerging Issues and Wild Cards
The concept of ‘emerging issues’ is used frequently in horizon scanning and other future-oriented activities and is not well defined in a conceptual way. Analysis of the issues that were scanned in the Sigma scan of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and OECD/DASTI scan shows that many issue descriptions within these scans are actually fact-based future storylines that envisage either ‘promising’ developments and events or ‘threatening’ developments and events that need either ‘support and fostering’ or ‘countervailing and adaptive measures’. Issues described this way are in fact ‘potentially’ emerging and come close to the concept of ‘future narratives’, as described and used by Van der Steen in his political discourse analysis. Van der Steen (2008) sees ‘future narratives’ as stories ‘about what the future, or possible futures, may or will (depending on the narrative) look like’ an
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