Introduction: Future-proofing policies – How foresight shapes European Union governance

Abstract

Introducing this issue, the present article notes how the growing political importance given to foresight in EU governance has so far only sparked limited interest among scholars of EU law and policy-making. To address this gap, the article starts by clarifying concepts and defining the key terminology at the intersection between (strategic) foresight and EU governance ‘in the law’ (involving societal actors in law-making processes) and ‘through law’ (governmental actors steering society via law). It then offers a comparative discussion of the main insights of the contributions to the issue, highlighting how and why foresight has become institutionalised and how it operates across EU institutions today. In the concluding section, the article turns to the future and calls for more research into how foresight shapes EU governance, setting a research agenda for the study of foresight as a practice informing law- and policy-making in the European Union.