ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the study and discusses their ramifications from various perspectives, emphasizing factors that affect the effectiveness and survival of the national foresight system and its auxiliary institutions. First, the chapter briefly reiterates the main factors that currently enhance future-regarding governance in Finland, including the leading role and influence-based capacity of non-elected policy experts to advance cross-governmental strategic policy planning. The chapter then turns to the risks of the current system, which predominantly relate to the same thing as the system's capacities to advance future-regarding policies: the pronounced role of professional expertise. We emphasize the detachment of elite perspectives from the day-to-day perceptions of ordinary citizens, a process that may already have begun. If this discrepancy translates into representation at the level of institutional politics, it could undermine the legitimacy and functioning of the strategic foresight system. We highlight the need to engage political challengers and ordinary citizens in visioning of future politics and suggest few institutional correctives that could amplify the voice of these groups in future-regarding policymaking.
