ABSTRACT
Many professionals assess the long term for policy audiences. They produce statements about prospective conditions, actions and events that have not yet happened, processes in flux, states not yet in existence, and policies not yet in force. We refer to this set of practices as policy-oriented foresight. We studied foresight in action with the aim of addressing the question: how do experts assess the future? Our analysis of foresight in action described in the previous chapters makes clear that there is no simple answer to that question. We did not come across a standard approach. Instead, we described futurists’ struggles with policy, with would-be standard tools, with prospective uncertainty, and with temporal repertoires and discontinuity.
