I’m not OP, obviously, and I am only speaking from experience here, so I have no data to back this up, but:
My feeling is that foresight projects have a tendency to become political very quickly, and they are much more about stakeholder engagement than they are about finding the truth, whereas forecasting can remain relatively objective for longer.
As the program is about forecasting, what is your stance on the broader field of foresight & futures studies? Why is forecasting more promising than some other approaches to foresight?
We are open to considering projects in “forecasting-adjacent” areas, and projects that combine forecasting with ideas from related fields are certainly well within the scope of the program.
As for projects that would exclusively rely on other approaches: My worry is that non-probabilistic foresight techniques typically don’t have more to show in terms of evidence for their effectiveness, while being more ad hoc from a theoretical perspective.
I’m not OP, obviously, and I am only speaking from experience here, so I have no data to back this up, but:
My feeling is that foresight projects have a tendency to become political very quickly, and they are much more about stakeholder engagement than they are about finding the truth, whereas forecasting can remain relatively objective for longer.
That being said: I am very excited about combining these approaches.
We are open to considering projects in “forecasting-adjacent” areas, and projects that combine forecasting with ideas from related fields are certainly well within the scope of the program.
As for projects that would exclusively rely on other approaches: My worry is that non-probabilistic foresight techniques typically don’t have more to show in terms of evidence for their effectiveness, while being more ad hoc from a theoretical perspective.