Mahshid Sotoudeh, Walter Peissl, Niklas Gudowsky and Anders Jacobi
Abstract
Long-term planning with a time-horizon exceeding 20 to 30 years is an important element of sustainable development. At the same time, economic actors apply flexible policies and use short-term planning to ensure profit. Environmental and social problems may also sometimes call for short-term solutions in order to save systems in acute danger. This creates a paradoxical situation: a society needs to define long-term targets for its infrastructure and achieve systematic changes in pursuing those, but the necessary short-term actions might not be in line with such long-term goals. If this apparent paradox is not solved through an appropriate governance method, it might lead to conflicts between different policy goals.
The concept of reflexive governance for transition management (Voß et al., 2006) tries to solve this apparent paradox and combines a number of short-term planning processes in a stage-wise and reflexive way to create a more comprehensive and innovative process of long-term planning for sustainable development. In this contribution, we introduce and discuss the CIVISTI method as a reflexive instrument for integrating different types of knowledge and creating a bridge between short- and long-term planning of research agendas. The method is designed for identifying future visions based on people’s hopes and fears, integrating them as input to dialogues between citizens, scientists, stakeholders and policy makers and identifying different future expectations on science and technology.
CIVISTI Method and a Brief Overview of Findings
Forward-looking activities and the identification of goals set by the society are a fixed element at each stage of reflexive governance. The main challenge is how to integrate different knowledge types, such as citizens’ visions and experts’ recommendations, into long-term planning in order to support the decision-making process. The CIVISTI method, an innovative forward-looking approach, addresses this challenge for research agendas through a well-designed combination of consultation and reflection steps.
Participation in Technology Assessment Most forward-looking activities take as their starting point what could be called the supply side. CIVISTI, on the other hand, tries to foster demand-side approaches. The CIVISTI project was a European research foresight exercise funded by the Socio-economic, Sciences and Humanities (SSH) Programme within the 7th Framework Programme of the EU (2007 – 2013). The aim of the project was to identify new and emerging topics for EU R&D policy by consulting citizens in seven European countries (Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Malta, Bulgaria and Hungary) and contribute to the future EU research programme for 2014 – 2020. The CIVISTI project revealed European citizens’ visions of the future and transformed these into relevant long-term science, technology and innovation issues.
A short introduction to the method is presented below.
Seven Citizen Panels of 25 people each were established, one in each of the seven CIVISTI partner countries. Each Citizen Consultation (CC1) took a long-term look at the needs, wishes, concerns and challenges of the future through a deliberative process. This was done during seven national citizen consultation weekends. The results were 69 visions for the future. After the translation of all visions into English, content analysis was performed. The second step was that experts and stakeholders analysed the citizens’ visions and transformed them into research recommendations and policy options for European research (Jacobi et al. 2011).
In the third step of the process (CC2), this list of 30 recommendations for research agendas and policy options was passed back to the citizens. The citizens validated and prioritized the new Science and Technology agendas and policy options the experts had developed on the basis of their visions. The second citizen consultation generated the feedback possibility for citizens and the validation of results. Citizens defined a set of criteria for good recommendations for a transparent validation process. The Austrian citizen panel defined among others the need for balanced recommendations that consider environmental and social impacts of technologies, generate jobs and are clear and understandable.
The feedback had a key function because although experts translated specific aspects of the citizens’ visions into more practical recommendations, they lost some of the former spirit of the visions in this transformation. The second round of reflection and validation of the experts’ recommendations by citizens solved part of this problem through additional comments by the citizens.
The final results were presented to relevant policy makers at a Policy Workshop in Brussels.
A detailed description of the CIVISTI process can be found in Jacobi et al. (2011). The results of the project show that citizen visions included a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary issues related to ageing, eco cities, education, energy, multicultural society, social fairness, mobility, intelligent devices, safety and security, and other questions.
The content analysis after the Citizen Consultation 1 showed that the citizens discussed the future in their holistic and “interdisciplinary” visions. The aim of the content analysis was to help experts and stakeholders find new issues and approaches for science, technology, innovation (STI) and policy-making (in relevant policy sectors). Each citizen’s vision
CIVISTI Method for Future Studies with Strong Participative Elements in CIVISTI contains multiple (approximately 8) themes at different levels of impact (individual, local, national, European and global levels). The format and time schedule (1.5 days) of citizen consultations encouraged shorter, 1-2 page narratives of what the future might or should look like 30-40 years from now.
The content analysis was based on a grounded theory approach that is generally applied in sociological analyses of qualitative data. The key idea of such an analysis is that any kind of qualitative data can be understood only through some form of conceptualization (or categories), and that these conceptualizations should have some kind of grounding in the data to which they refer. The idea of the grounded approach is, in other words, to maximally base the analysis on the data rather than apply any predefined concepts/categories to the analysis.
The CIVISTI top ten recommendations for research and development are as follows:
• Attractive public transportation
• Decentralised energy
• Re-appropriate the countryside
• Tools for disabled people
• (European) eco-cities
• Social innovation for ageing society
• Direct democracy through e-voting
• Develop effective urban infrastructure
• Policies towards immigrants and refugees
• Dignity in the dying process
• Plants for extreme weather
The above comprehensive list shows that a promising application of CIVISTI results could be their use as a holistic framework for the evaluation of activities and an early assessment of long-term plans. Therefore, the results as a whole should be analysed and refined to create an integrated set of criteria for future research activities. For instance, according to the top-10 recommendations package, the technology development for ageing society should be related to the needs of eco-cities, independent living, active ageing at work and social participation with the help of public transport, social innovations, etc. and be developed on the basis of specific local situations. In the same way, a public transport system should consider the idea of an ageing society and so on.
Participation in Technology Assessment CIVISTI Method as a Tool for Knowledge Generation
One of the main functions of the CIVISTI method is the translation of implicit knowledge of emotions, fears and hopes related to the future to explicit knowledge of needs for scientific research. The method supports generating knowledge of interrelated societal and technological issues and contexts. The citizens’ visions are a source for interdisciplinary and comprehensive description of future societal challenges. Balabanian (2006) shows the challenge of innovation due to the complexity of Challenges. He considers environmental problems to be a part of new societal problems, parallel to other issues such as health problems due to industrial waste and hazards, psychological/emotional problems due to the substitution of machine values for human values, militaristic problems due to hi-tech militarization and social problems due to centralization. In view of the interdisciplinary character of the citizens’ visions, experts have the possibility to identify expected interrelated societal challenges with environmental and economic problems. The scope of expert recommendations based on the citizen visions is therefore broader and more comprehensive than usual.
The three CIVISTI steps from visions to validated recommendations can be shown on the following short example from Austrian reports (www.civisti.org):
• CIVISTI Citizen Consultation 1-Austria, June 2009
Vision 9: Disabled people as fully valuable members of the society. Integration of disabled people should be achieved through affordable tools and the involvement of disabled people in daily life as well as more research on treatment and the prevention of disability even before birth.
• CIVISTI Expert & stakeholder workshop, June 2010 in Sofia
Recommendation (R2): Tools for disabled people based on Vision 9 . Investigating the state of the art in the development of tools for disabled people and older adults. Based on the introduction of a balanced multidisciplinary approach to the issue by involving experts from technological and social sciences
• CIVISTI Citizen Consultation 2-Austria, October 2010
A part of the citizen feedback regarding the recommendation of “tools for disabled people”
is presented below:
“…Disabled people are an enrichment of life. Therefore, they deserve support and greater integration. As obstacles in daily life exclude disabled people, I think research in the area is urgently required.”
“Recommendation (R2) reflects strongly (at least partly) vision 9, and it is partly desirable.
However, the original vision focused on prenatal and postnatal cases.”
Validated recommendations from all seven countries were finally presented at the final policy workshop in Brussels in January 2011.
CIVISTI Method for Future Studies with Strong Participative Elements The CIVISTI method has been analysed at the ITA since 2011 on the basis of the integration of results in the decision-making process on the local and national level (Sotoudeh et al.
2011). The results of explorative interviews show different views about the impact of this participatory method. The interviewees mentioned inter alia that the scientific community, the administration, and the media have different mechanisms for the selection of results and need different levels of information. Main factors identified for the improvement of the integration of results are optimized timing between different phases of consultation and reflection, thematic focus, integration of local policy especially for discussing tensions between short- and long-term projects and new strategies for the validation of qualitative results.
Conclusions
The CIVISTI method generated multidimensional and holistic targets. The method is unique in its emphasis on the demand side as its starting point. The strong focus on citizens’
visions of the future of Europe is an enriching innovation for futures studies. While citizen consultations in foresight studies and forward-looking activities usually go no further than letting the citizens express their visions or opinions in relation to a subject, CIVISTI takes the next step as well.
The CIVISTI method provides a systematic and citizens-oriented assessment of relevant issues for future scientific research and technological development. The method is valuable for the generation of knowledge and identification of values since it identifies implicit knowledge of future hopes and fears, which can be discussed by experts and stakeholders, integrates this knowledge with corresponding stakeholder and expert recommendations and generates new knowledge of research needs that will be evaluated by all involved citizens.
While the qualitative character of knowledge generation in CIVISTI has been well developed, there is a need for research and optimization of the integration of results into the decision-making process.
In light of this the ITA applies the CIVISTI method in a new project for the identification of citizens’ visions on Autonomous and Ambient assisted Living (AAL) in Vienna. To improve the validation process, results of the qualitative part of CIVISTI will be presented for a broader public debate and evaluated with an on-line tool. Close cooperation with the city administration and interested groups at the city level should improve the consideration of short- and long-term issues and the integration of results into long-term development and city planning. An external evaluation of this project will provide more insight with regard to the need for further development of this forward-looking method.
References: Page 393
The World Wide Views Citizen Consultations