The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) presents on its website a brief but dense explanation of what it itself understands by “strategic foresight”. So not a report, but a description of method: how does this EU advisory body look at the future, and how does that fit into the broader European architecture of looking ahead, alongside the European Commission, ESPAS and the European Parliament? For the database this is an interesting exception to the usual report analyses: here we are not dissecting one foresight study, but the way an entire institution relates structurally to the discipline.
The source is the page “Strategic foresight at the EESC” on eesc.europa.eu (node/129796). An important caveat up front: this page exists in content only in English and French. The Dutch-language URL (eesc.europa.eu/nl/node/129796) does show the Dutch site navigation, but the main text itself has not been translated and appears in English. Where this article therefore cites “the EESC page”, it refers to the English-language source.
Method: what is strategic foresight according to the EESC
The EESC describes strategic foresight as “a future-focused discipline that aims to anticipate and address emerging challenges and opportunities”. It involves analysing long-term trends, identifying driving forces of change and exploring possible disruptions on the social, economic, political, ecological and technological level. The EESC explicitly emphasises the distinction from traditional forecasting: foresight does not predict a “single future”, but helps to understand what is changing and to explore different alternative futures, so that today’s decisions take long-term effects into account.
The EESC page itself does not list a specific set of methods such as horizon scanning, scenario planning or Delphi panels. That concrete toolkit is set out on the foresight page of the European Commission, with which the EESC works closely via ESPAS. Three techniques are named there, and they are illustrative of what also underlies EESC exercises:
- Horizon scanning: a structured approach to detect and analyse emerging “game changers” at an early stage, and to prioritise early signals for decision-making or further research.
- Megatrends analysis: mapping major global trends and driving forces, followed by an exploration of their impact on a policy area.
- Scenario development and exploration: an iterative process of interviews, analysis and modelling that results in alternative images of the future, used as a compass rather than a prediction, and with which policy options can be “stress tested” against each other.
The participatory element is where the EESC distinguishes itself from the Commission: by deploying its members and the networks of civil society organisations, the EESC claims a role in detecting “weak signals” from civil society, something a scientific service such as the Joint Research Centre (JRC) has less direct access to.
Time horizon. Because this is not a report with a single target year, the horizon differs per instrument the EESC works with. The Commission’s annual EU Strategic Foresight Reports, on which the EESC formally advises, generally look 15 to 25 years ahead (the 2025 edition explicitly “through 2040 and beyond”), while the ESPAS Global Trends Reports appear every five years with a comparable horizon. So there is no fixed EESC horizon, but there is a recurring series of multi-year outlooks.
Since when. The EESC page itself does not name a start year. The trail of formal EESC involvement can be traced via the opinions the body issues: the first EESC opinion on an EU Strategic Foresight Report dates from 2020 (opinion INT/918, on the Commission’s very first report “Charting the course towards a more resilient Europe”). Since then the EESC has issued its own opinion on every annual edition, with the most recent on the 2025 report (“Resilience 2.0”).
In practice: how the EESC and the broader EU use strategic foresight
In practice, the EESC fills its foresight role in four ways.
- It issues an annual opinion on the European Commission’s Strategic Foresight Report.
- It commissions its own forward-looking studies to underpin evidence-based policy advice.
- It organises its own foresight events and joint exercises with other EU institutions and with civil society.
- It contributes to the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS), among other things through foresight papers, reports and conferences.
Important is the EESC’s precise role within ESPAS: it is not a core institution. ESPAS is an inter-institutional cooperation between the European Commission, the European Parliament, the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU and the European External Action Service, “with support from” the Committee of the Regions and the EESC. A concrete example of that contribution is a recent ESPAS Ideas Paper exploring how the green and digital transitions could affect the role of organised civil society in the EU by 2050.
The broader EU architecture within which the EESC operates consists of at least three other major links:
- The European Commission has published an annual EU Strategic Foresight Report since 2020, drawn up by the Secretariat-General with the methodological support of the JRC. The series follows a recognisable line: 2020 on resilience across four dimensions (economic-social, geopolitical, green, digital) during the coronavirus crisis, 2021 on “capacity and freedom to act” through 2050, 2022 on the greening and digitalisation of five strategic sectors, 2023 on sustainability and wellbeing within open strategic autonomy, and 2025 as “Resilience 2.0” through 2040 and beyond. These reports feed directly into the annual State of the Union address and the Commission’s annual work programme: foresight here is thus not a standalone report, but a fixed step in the policy cycle.
- ESPAS (established in the early 2010s) produces a Global Trends Report every five years, always just before a new institutional cycle, plus ongoing horizon scanning reports and foresight papers, and organises an annual ESPAS conference, jointly organised by Parliament and Commission.
- The European Parliament set up its own Global Trends Unit within its research service (EPRS) in 2015, which grew into the current Policy Foresight Unit. This published the “Global Trendometer” until 2019, a periodic trend analysis specifically for members of parliament, separate from the Commission’s reports.
- The Council of the EU participates in ESPAS via its General Secretariat, but has no visible public foresight report of its own like the Commission or Parliament: its contribution remains largely internal and inter-institutional.
Interesting observations for foresight practitioners
What stands out when you place these four tracks side by side is that the EU does not have one foresight process, but at least four partly overlapping ones: the EESC, the Commission/JRC, ESPAS and the European Parliament, with the Council as a silent inter-institutional partner. Is that fragmentation or healthy pluralism?
There is evidence for both readings. In favour of pluralism is that each institution adds a different perspective that the others structurally lack: the EESC brings in civil society and the social partners, something a scientific service such as the JRC has little direct access to. The European Parliament, with the Global Trendometer, brought in a parliamentary, electorally sensitive perspective that the Commission itself would not write. ESPAS in turn bundles that at inter-institutional level into a shared picture ahead of a new governance cycle. In favour of fragmentation is that the EESC itself, in response to the Strategic Foresight Reports, has repeatedly indicated that it is involved too late: the body advocates a permanent, structured mechanism to help think along from the very start of each Commission foresight cycle, rather than only being allowed to comment on an almost finished report. That is a recognisable coordination problem of multiple institutions that formally cooperate, but in practice work one after another.
Sharper criticism comes from the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (BIG), which argued in 2026 that EU foresight is indeed institutionalised, but structurally carries too little political weight: it sits primarily with the JRC, a scientific service, under a portfolio (intergenerational fairness, youth, culture and sport) that has no direct lever over geopolitical or defence decisions. The report points out that early warnings of the Russian invasion of Ukraine did in fact exist, but that foresight analysis and political action were insufficiently connected. Our own reading here: this is precisely the difference between foresight as an analytical product and foresight as a governance mandate. The EU has amply institutionalised the former, and barely the latter.
For a Dutch organisation wanting to set up its own foresight, there are three transferable lessons from the EU architecture, provided you translate them to a much smaller scale:
- Choose a fixed annual cycle instead of ad-hoc trend reports. The strongest institutional feature of the Commission’s approach is not the content of the reports, but the fact that they appear annually and flow automatically into the work programme and the State of the Union. A trend report detached from a decision-making moment disappears into a drawer; a trend report tied to the annual planning gets read.
- Arrange proximity to the top, not just independence. Examples of well-functioning national foresight ecosystems (such as Finland, where Sitra and the National Foresight Network run through the Prime Minister’s office) combine a degree of independence from day-to-day politics with a fixed place close to the highest decision-makers. Foresight that sits only within a research department, as is largely the case with the EU now, risks remaining without influence.
- Evaluate afterwards what happened to earlier scenarios. Estonia’s Foresight Centre structurally compares earlier scenarios with actual developments. Without that step, foresight remains a one-off exercise rather than a learning system, and the organisation itself also has no way of knowing whether the method works.
Sources
Dutch-language URL of the EESC page (shows Dutch site navigation, but the main text itself is only in English/French): eesc.europa.eu/nl/node/129796
English-language version (original text): Strategic foresight at the EESC, European Economic and Social Committee, 2025
European Commission, methods overview: Strategic foresight, European Commission
European Commission: 2020 Strategic Foresight Report, “Charting the course towards a more resilient Europe”
European Commission: 2025 Strategic Foresight Report, “Resilience 2.0”
ESPAS: About ESPAS, European Strategy and Policy Analysis System
ESPAS: ESPAS Ideas Paper, EU civil society 2050
European Parliament (EPRS): Global Trendometer 2019, European Parliamentary Research Service
EESC opinion: Strategic foresight: the EESC says it can help make better foresight if involved more and earlier in the process, EESC, 2022
Brussels Institute for Geopolitics: Kate O’Riordan and Eliott de Smedt Day, “Strategic Foresight in the EU: The Architecture of Tomorrow”, 2026
