For quite some time, I have been focusing more closely on the Black Sea region, developing research and analysis ideas and looking at the region increasingly from within its own political and strategic environment, rather than from afar across transatlantic time zones. Given how smitten I have also become with strategic anticipation, foresight and everything in between and around them, I have spent quite a lot of time over the past few months thinking about how to structure this work through a strategic foresight lens. After researching, analysing and connecting old and new knowledge about the region from different angles, the next natural step is sustained and methodical foresight work that actually delivers. One question has persisted for me for some time now: how should this exercise be done properly, in such a way that it is well-informed and genuinely useful, rather than producing yet another abstract visionary reflection about a future with little grounding in what might plausibly happen?
Part of this reflection comes from returning to Europe after many years in the United Nations multilateral ecosystem. One of the things that has continued to strike me since coming back is the highly uneven way in which debates that occupied considerable political and diplomatic attention in New York have travelled into wider European policy conversations.
The UN’s more recent work on the future and long-term governance – from the UN75 Declaration (2020) and the Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda report to the Summit of the Future, the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations (2024) – developed over several years and through a very extensive multi-track process of consultations and intergovernmental negotiations. The resulting agenda is much broader than foresight alone, of course. It touches on the reform of global governance and the international financial architecture, peace and security, digital cooperation, sustainable development and, importantly, the way institutions take account of longer-term consequences and the interests of future generations. Running through it is a deceptively simple but fundamental question: how can institutions respond to immediate crises, as they must, while also becoming better at anticipating change and effectively governing for the longer term?
Over the past couple of years, I came to realise that the extent to which this agenda has travelled beyond the institutions directly involved in negotiating it varies considerably. In Brussels, the picture seems more developed than I had initially assumed. The European Union engaged closely with the process and fed substantially into the negotiations, while elements of the resulting Pact and the Declaration on Future Generations are increasingly reflected in discussions around strategic foresight, intergenerational fairness and longer-term policymaking. Yet much of this conversation still appears concentrated within EU institutions and relatively specialised policy communities. Beyond those circles, the UN dimension of international policy debates can remain surprisingly faint – an observation that I have heard echoed in parts of the Brussels think tank and research community.
In Romania, the contrast is sharper. Romania participated in the negotiations, engaged at governmental level throughout the process. What appears less visible, however, is the extent to which this diplomatic engagement has translated into any sort of domestic conversation about what these commitments might mean for policymaking, public administration and society. The Pact for the Future has so far generated extremely limited awareness and public debate in Romania, while its underlying ideas – longer-term governance, anticipatory thinking, the interests of future generations and the systematic use of foresight – remain relatively little referenced in the wider policy discourse.
This matters beyond the visibility of one UN agreement. The Pact is among the most ambitious recent attempts to place longer time horizons and future generations more firmly within contemporary governance. If such ideas remain confined largely within the diplomatic process through which they were negotiated, what is then their practical significance and impact? For countries and regions facing rapid structural change, the more consequential question is what happens after the agreement: whether its underlying principles begin to influence how institutions think, organise knowledge, anticipate risks and make choices whose consequences will unfold over decades.
It is against this background that strategic foresight becomes particularly relevant. Foresight is sometimes treated as another term for policy planning or forecasting. In fact, strategic foresight is an analytical methodology for exploring possible futures under conditions of uncertainty. Its methods can be applied to public policy and international relations, but equally to businesses, industries and the private sector more broadly. Foresight does not tell us what the future will be, but it provides structured ways of examining how change might unfold, questioning assumptions, identifying emerging developments and considering the implications of different possible futures.
Long-term governance is something different. It concerns how governments and institutions incorporate longer time horizons, uncertainty, preparedness and the interests of future generations into policymaking and decision-making. Foresight can contribute to that process, but the two concepts are not interchangeable.
For the Black Sea region, this distinction matters.
Foresight is not, in its truest and most useful form, a one-person exercise. It needs collaboration, an exchange of ideas and perspectives, and the possibility of challenging assumptions rather than simply reinforcing them.
My initial idea has been quite simple: to develop a research and analysis project that also includes, as foresight work naturally requires, a collaborative approach on specific aspects, looking at the region in a genuinely cross-sectoral way, using a systems-thinking lens and comparing different sets of knowledge and perspectives to understand how its political, security, economic, technological, energy and societal dynamics interact. And once there is a clearer picture of these connections, we can explore where we might go from here.
This is also what led me to explore existing foresight networks and communities of practice. Although there is clearly a growing international community around futures thinking and foresight, I have not yet found one that focuses specifically on the Black Sea region – certainly not on the wider Black Sea as an interconnected political, economic and strategic space subject to multidimensional volatility.
And there is another gap that is obviously there: not everyone working in foresight works on policy, and not everyone working on policy uses foresight. What is most interesting is precisely the space between the two: bringing policy questions into foresight, and translating foresight thinking back into policy analysis.
The simplest way that I can describe it is probably as a Venn diagram: Black Sea expertise, policy practice and strategic foresight, with an overlap that still feels surprisingly underdeveloped.
So this is the idea that I have been exploring: whether a small community of practice could create that space where people genuinely interested in, and focused on, the Black Sea region could learn, test ideas, exchange perspectives and gradually build a shared practice around thinking about the region’s possible futures.
The challenge, for me, is therefore no longer simply about carrying out foresight on the Black Sea, but about understanding how to find or create the necessary momentum and conditions for sustained foresight thinking about the region; and, moving forward, how to enable an exchange of foresight perspectives and gradually build greater awareness of the importance of futures thinking, especially in a region like the Black Sea, marked by so much ongoing volatility and, at the same time, by so many changes lying ahead.
And this is how Black Sea Futures took one more step forward…