Aiming for a sustainable future: conceptualizing public open foresight

Abstract

Sustainability as a global challenge concerns actors across organizational and national boundaries. Meeting the complexity of the sustainability challenge requires collaboration between various stakeholders and strategies with long-term focus. Various authors propose foresight activities to enhance decisions related to strategies and innovations for a more sustainable future. We follow this call and suggest a new direction to be taken in public management concerning sustainability and investigate ‘public open foresight’: an inter-organizational discussion and analysis process of public sector organizations regarding future developments. This article applies open foresight to the public realm by presenting a process framework and outlining propositions for further research.