The news from Lithuania:
We have just published (yesterday) the research article: Measuring the Intangible: a Multidimensional Framework for Assessing Societal Engagement in Participatory Foresight
This paper explores the impacts of participatory foresight and societal engagement in policymaking, specifically focusing on Lithuania’s “Lithuania 2050” national visioning process. Participatory foresight integrates diverse stakeholders in strategic processes, yielding tangible outputs like policies and plans, as well as intangible benefits such as increased trust, shared responsibility, and democratic engagement. However, its qualitative and societal impacts often remain underexplored, limiting foresight’s transformative potential. The study proposes and empirically validates a conceptual framework to assess the multidimensional impacts of participatory foresight, emphasizing immediate and intermediate outcomes and focusing on intangible impacts of societal engagement. Using survey data from “Lithuania 2050” co-creators, the research validates diagnostic constructs for participatory foresight impacts using exploratory factor analysis. The proposed final framework bridges theoretical and practical gaps, providing tools for rigorous impact evaluation and highlighting participatory foresight’s potential to enhance inclusivity, resilience, and open governance. Limitations include the need for further validation and long-term impact framework development. This study contributes to advancing participatory foresight impact assessment models, developing valid scales for measuring the impacts of participatory foresight in quantitative research, and fostering open governance.
here is the link: Measuring the intangible: A multidimensional framework for assessing societal engagement in participatory foresight - ScienceDirect
In September, we started a new interdisciplinary module, “Futures Studies”, available to all students at Vilnius University (see attached picture). It is a new model for Vilnius University and Lithuania as a whole.
The aim of Future Studies is to develop the student’s ability to form insights into the future by applying and combining knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines (social, humanities, technology, and nature ) and the ability to solve complex problems by identifying the actions that will lead to solutions to the complex problems and to the creation of a desirable future. Students apply methods that stimulate creativity and logical thinking to see a wide range of different futures, understand their plausibility, and use critical thinking tools to analyse what, how and why shapes specific different futures, whether in their personal lives, in society, or in a particular industry.
It is lead by Assoc. Prof. Erika Vaiginiene with contributions by Prof. Jonas Dagys, Prof. Egidijus Rimkus, Assoc. Prof. Mariusz Antonowicz and dr. Linas Butemas.