Foresight and regulation: anticipatory governance and administrative foresight in times of transition and recovery

Abstract

[EN] Administrative law has the challenge to protect rights without a time and general. Regulation and administrative activity, in its pursuit of the general interest, cannot renounce the creation of spaces for the exercise of executive power in a collaborative or participatory manner. Considering the possible future means adapting the rules and the activity of the administration to the current reality, without compromising the actions of governments in the future in order to respect international consensus, such as the green pact and sustainable economic recovery.

Esta situación es objeto de reflexión en esta obra colectiva que constituye la primera reflexión realizada por los investigadores del proyecto de investigación I+D+I financiado por el Ministerio de ciencia e innovación, Gobierno de España con el título: Por un consenso de futuro sostenible: Gobernanza anticipatoria y Prospectiva administrativa (PROFUTURE) PID2020-116401GB-I00

Foresight offers a range of experiences for a practical application of foresight to administrative planning and policy development. These tools are based on the bureaucratic reality and the competences of public administrations. As a consequence of the health, economic and energy crises, administrations will have to face planning and decision-making for recovery. Are they prepared? Administrations make decisions with models that do not foresee their impact on the future. Rather, they react to external situations and problems that are precipitated and the impact analysis is often identified a posteriori. Public administrations make decisions based on dialogues framed in rules and procedures designed only to solve the present, but should allow action in various future scenarios.

This book is the result of a multidisciplinary and international research that aims to analyze and use techniques that already exist in other countries to anticipate situations by incorporating the knowledge of science and its differents predictions of the future. This techniques should count on consensus dialogues and citizen participation to be generated by public administrations and executive power.

This group of researchers from United Kingdom, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Brazil presents reflections and mechanisms that will make a new form of legal production of rules and policy plans to incorporate and impact the future, through a consensus debate with scientists, experts, technicians, companies and individuals, based on Europe Next Generation. Foresight is applied to administrative regulation and decision making process, ecological transition, urban tourism and transport planning, defense, gender, environmental and migratory crisis, from a legal and multidisciplinary analysis.