Building Consensus for a sustainable Future: Anticipatory Governance and Administrative Foresight

Congreso Internacional Diálogos de Futuro

Administrative law must allow the sustainable protection of rights without a temporary commitment and under the common interest as a motivation for its reason for being. Regulation and administrative activity, in their pursuit of the general interest, cannot renounce creating spaces for the exercise of executive power in a collaborative or participatory manner. Considering the possible future means adapting the regulations and the activity of the administration to the current reality, without compromising the actions of governments in the future to respect international consensus, such as the green deal and sustainable economic recovery.

Anticipatory governance offers a range of experiences to implement foresight in practice to administrative planning and rule-making. These tools are based on the bureaucratic reality and the operation of public administrations. After the health and economic crisis, administrations will have to face planning and decision-making for reconstruction. Are they ready? Administrations make decisions with models that do not foresee their impacts in the future. Rather, they react to external situations and problems that are precipitating and impact analysis is often identified posteriori. Public Administrations make decisions based on dialogues framed in the rules and procedures designed only to solve the present, but they should allow action in various future scenarios.

Governments of Member States and public administrations will face the challenge in the coming years to be agents of planning for the Recovery of Europe after COVID. Without a doubt, it represents the greatest challenge since World War II. Europe has approved a Recovery Plan to overcome the economic and social crisis and ensure the sustainable modernization of the reconstruction process. It's about designing the future.

The reconstruction experience should serve to improve Administrative Law, by means of rules that allow a margin of action and adaptation to foreseeable scenarios in the future, which science and data already anticipate, establishing guidelines so that decision-making bodies know how to act in foreseeable crises in the future. This research aims to analyse and use techniques that already exist in other countries to anticipate situations incorporating the knowledge of science. This will provide a method to publica Administrations to plan building in a more rational and proactive method.

This group of researchers is committed to the study new options of planning that adapts to the future, through consensus between scientists, experts, technicians, companies and people, based on the Europa Next Generation proposal. We want to take advantage of this research to create spaces for consensual dialogue between science, administrations and citizens considering future generations.

Mechanisms such as foresight or foresight applied to administrative innovation, future commissions, integrated government foresight, normative foresight, transition management and prospective strategic planning will be analysed in this work that seeks a sustainable future solution.