Shapking the Future Vision - the Activity of Foresight : Implications arising from the concept of resilience and the analysis of governance structure(<Special Report>The Way to Bear Japan's Futures)

Abstract

This paper reveiwes the development of the first to the fifth generation of foresight in existing literature and shows how the change in the relationship between science and society has impacted the roles and concept of foresight. The paper finds that the concepts of "diversity" and "dispersion" are the key characteristics of the foresight needed today. These concepts are also discussed in the resilience discussion in ecology and governance literature. The emphasis on these two concepts requires the changes in governance structures from a traditional top-down linear model to a more decentralized network type, where the government acts as a coordinator of multi-level requirements from a meta-governance perspective. Institutional redesign is needed to avoid the potential tension between the concepts of "diversity" and "dispersion", and the concepts of "stability" and "certainty" under the law. The paper also stresses that foresight must be a reflexive and continuous process as it has distributional implication.