Policy Brief #4. How can foresight contribute to building societal resilience?

This policy brief explains how strategic foresight strengthens societal resilience by building coping, adaptive/transformative, and participatory capacities. It shows how structured, participatory anticipation helps actors make sense of crises, embrace uncertainty, and embed long-term perspectives in planning. Evidence from FUTURESILIENCE Labs illustrates practice: TIMES (Cesena, Italy) develops governance and infrastructure to channel citizen mobilisation for emergency response via 2050 storytelling; MULTILOCAL (Estonia) creates a data tool and inter-municipal cooperation to manage the fiscal and service impacts of multilocal living; IMMER (France-Germany) uses long-horizon scenarios, sci fi storytelling, and an immersive app to train cross-border readiness. The brief calls for embedding foresight across agencies, strengthening multi-level collaboration and long-term training, and applying scenario-based policy stress-testing.