This deep dive is part of the Foresight towards the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe project.

An increasingly volatile global geopolitical context is emerging with growing threats not only to global security and governance but also to the EU and neighbourhood countries. These conflicts, which can escalate and spread quickly across national borders, highlight the fact that the EU is becoming increasingly vulnerable due to its dependence on a volatile transatlantic relationship. No global institution or authority guarantees stable relationships as the United Nations is often in the position of a toothless tiger. Instead, there is a vacuum in global governance.

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The EU’s dependence on the transatlantic partnership and NATO is both a source of strength and weakness; the recent legislation period has shown an un-cooperative US President, an ambivalent US-China relationship, and the US in a position to dictate terms to the EU. All this takes place in an environment of major geopolitical upheaval and reconfigurations, with the rise of new regional powers, and the emergence of new actors, creating uncertainty about future coalitions. Growing political instability in the EU’s neighbourhood was made worse by the pandemic, and its economic and social effects represent another challenge to the EU’s global standing and security.

The Reference Foresight Scenarios report from the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) summarizes the results of a foresight process that started at the end of 2020 with the goal to develop a set of reference foresight scenarios to support policymakers. Foresight scenarios are a tool to improve strategy development and decision making in a context of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. Recent events, such as the COVID pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, made clear that being prepared for the unknown and unexpected becomes increasingly important. The reference scenarios presented in this report aim to help decision makers to increase the preparedness of their organisations under increasingly unpredictable circumstances.

The scenarios are four plausible versions of how the world may look like in 2040 and what this would mean for Europe’s global standing. They are called Storms, End game, Struggling synergies, and Opposing views. They do not claim to predict or project how the future may look like but offer strategic reflections, which can serve as a compass for policymakers for navigating through unchartered territories of turbulence, uncertainty, ambiguity and novelty. These four geopolitical scenarios are called ‘Reference’ Foresight Scenarios because they represent a forward-looking framework that provides a reference for use in policymakers’ debates about potential futures.

The study was conducted between 2020-2023 by European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC).

Read the report

Read the blog and learn more about the process and how these scenarios can be used in future oriented policy making.

Stress-testing policy options with the scenarios

The work with the reference foresight scenarios continued as a pilot process of stress-testing some policy options against a set of Reference foresight scenarios. The process was led by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and applied to a specific EU policy proposal on Standard Essential Patents. The process ran during the initial stage of the impact assessment process, but it was not an official part of it. The results of this pilot helped to understand which policy options are more or less robust and how they can be made more future-proof. The process also provided rich insights into what the challenges and opportunities of this approach are, and into how stress-testing can be further incorporated into EU policymaking. The report provides an example and serve as a guide for any future process of stress-testing policy options against foresight scenarios.

Read the report: Stress-testing of policy options using foresight scenarios: a pilot case