European Parliament Briefing on: Evidence for policy-making - Foresight-based scientific advice:

Major steps in the foresight process include: First, 'horizon scanning' provides information on what is known today (evidence and facts) and adds insights about what can be envisaged to happen in the future, including what is less likely to happen and what is plausible, and including desirable and undesirable futures. Second, by applying scenario methods, foresight facilitates the policy-making process, by helping to build insights as to what policy should be prepared for. Finally, by backcasting these envisioned scenarios on which policy should be prepared to the body of legislative texts, foresight adds a 'stress testing' function to the policy- making process, which adds trustworthiness to the assessment of policy options in policy analyses.

Also see:

Amuso, V. and Van Woensel, L. (2025), Reflections on Applying Systems Thinking to Stakeholder Mapping: The STOA Unit at the European Parliament. Global Policy, 16: 403-409. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13494

Van Woensel, L. (2020). A bias radar for responsible policy-making: Foresight-based scientific advice. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32126-0.