Future threat scenarios for identifying societal security needs - the methodological approach based on European Project Ettis

This paper outlines the methodology of developing scenarios in the context of security that can be used as a base for meeting societal challenges today. These challenges are seen in handling of threats that might occur in the future which is described in alternative scenarios. These scenarios represent different combinations of alternative developments and trends in politics, economics, technology and society. Handling threats that might affect the society implies finding solutions. The usual way in foresight activities and technology assessment, in particular in the field of security, lies in outlining solution-oriented options and recommendations for arising challenges. For the project ETTIS (European Trends and Threats in Society), this approach was modified by integrating the need-perspective. This need-oriented approach for deriving solutions ought to address the actual needs of the society in order to find the appropriate solutions and can be seen as an intermediate step between the identification of threats and solutions. The analysis to date has shown that the involved experts have very different perceptions of threats as well as security needs: (i) There is a difficulty to define what is the difference between needs and solutions. (ii) There are conflicts and cross influences between needs. (iii) Finally, despite the different framework conditions in scenarios, the resulting needs do not vary significantly in different scenarios, however the impact differs between them and is significantly higher or lower.