Exploring New Tools to Support Regional Foresight Initiatives

From 2020 to 2022, twelve Regional Foresight exercises in the EU and neighbouring countries, provided a living laboratory for exploring the use of novel tools and techniques in highly participative approaches to local policy co-design, led by teams at regional and sub-regional level. To this end POLIRURAL teams designed and developed novel IT systems intended to support and enrich stakeholder engagement in those 12 regional Foresight exercises.

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One of those systems employed a wide range of Text Mining and Machine learning techniques to support the work of readers and researchers tasked with discovering relevant information in large libraries of documents, with a view to reducing the burden of work required of local leadership teams to provide stakeholders with short, relevant, and timely texts on complex issues that affect their region, and which may require a policy response. This tool is called the SEMANTIC EXPLORER (SE).

Our biggest effort was devoted to the use of System Dynamic Modelling or SDM, in a tool allowing normal citizens to explore the impact of different policy options on regional KPIs or indicators of performance. This tool is called the POLICY OPTIONS EXPLORER (POE).

Our third tool is the RURAL ATTRACTIVENESS EXPLORER (RAE). It connects the POE to a composite Index of Rural Attractiveness (RAI), allowing users to see how different policy choices will play out over time in terms of their impact on the Index of Rural Attractiveness.

An important aspect of all of this work was to better understand how one can help non-experts, as opposed to professional economists, statisticians, and modellers, to better understand how the world is changing, how the challenge of growth and development is evolving, and the range of available real-world policy options, with the intention of being able to take part in a meaningful and impactful local policy process.

To find out more, the reader is invited to follow the links to our pages on