When Good Waters Go Bad

This chapter offers commentary on adaptation and resilience to stresses on water systems in a potentially catastrophic future. While considering futures studies as an integral part of science education is not new, reorganizing knowledge and its deployment to equip future leaders to address the complexity, paradox and unpredictability of problem requires new educational paradigms. Youth are poised as agents of change in a collaborative, networked, and complexity-embracing future. Through exploring the changes in waters due to climate change and human activity, and what those changes may mean for developing and maintaining resilience in the postnormal future, a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework guides new alternatives for education and water policy action in these changing times and within the broad goals of sustainability.

Teaching Foresight and Futures Literacy and Its Integration into University Curriculum

Despite the accelerated dynamics of the environment, higher education institutions slowly update their curricula in entrepreneurship education according to global challenges and market needs. Moreover, knowledge and good practice exchanges between educators of futures studies, business representatives, and academics is limited. This article aims to present a methodology for prototyping an online course for individuals to become more future-oriented in their professional and personal settings. The main research problems tackled by the authors relate to: 1) the identification of competences that would help academics, entrepreneurs, and students to deal with uncertainty and to 2) convey the competences to the target groups through learning topics selected from futures studies and the entrepreneurship repertoire. The authors of the article undertook and coordinated theoretical and empirical research on foresight and Futures Literacy and its correspondence with entrepreneurship within the beFORE project funded under the Erasmus+ program’s Knowledge Alliance scheme. The research process resulted in the identification of 12 key competence items and the development of a free, approximately 34-hour-long online course consisting of seven self-standing modules, 25 lessons, and 79 learning topics corresponding to these competences. The originality of the paper is in its contribution to the discussion on the competences and online course content that efficiently increase the capacities of using the future(s) in professional, academic, and personal settings.

What can we know about the future? Epistemology and the credibility of claims about the world ahead

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the results of futures studies are knowledge or if not, what it is that futures studies actually produce. Five types of representations of the future are the result of these studies. As the value of futures studies depends on no small measure of their credibility, the standards for carrying out and reporting these studies are identified along with a description of how Toulmin’s model of informal logic can be used to best improve their credibility. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a multi-disciplinary literature review and integrative analysis. Findings Using epistemological criteria for knowledge as truth, belief and rationale, the results of futures studies are not and cannot be knowledge. Instead, futures studies produce five kinds of “representations of the future”: predictions, projections and forecasts, scenarios, visions and structures for action. Six standards for conducting and reporting the results of futures studies are provided which will increase the credibility of these studies. Toulmin’s informal logic format will provide the foundation for the most persuasive basis of such studies. Practical implications Futurists will understand that the products of their studies are not knowledge and why this is the case. They will also understand that the type of futures studies they are conducting are either conditional, contingent propositions or normative prescriptions in nature. There are six guidelines for carrying out and reporting futures studies which can also be used to assess the quality of published studies. They will see how the use of a certain kind of informal logic can establish the most credible foundations for their studies. Originality/value As an integrative literature review, it incorporates and simplifies widely disparate existing contributions to the topic of the nature of knowledge regarding futures studies and the criteria for making such studies as credible as possible.

Reflections on the future visions of UK tourism outlined in Burkart and Medlik's 1974 book: tourism: past, present, and future

PurposeTo explore the future visions outlined in one of the first academic books on UK tourism to venture into tourism futures. Through today’s lens, their visions are explored through three topics: Future Markets and Destinations; Future Resources; and the Future Organization of Tourism.Design/methodology/approachExploring the backstory, key drivers and tipping points of UK tourism development and tourism education during the 1960s and 1970s, they help to understand the rationale for the authors 1974 future visions of UK tourism. These visions are tested against reality, using a mixture of data, softer evidence and the authors’ judgements.FindingsAcknowledging the authors showed courage in presenting their future visions, when so little was known about the development of tourism, let alone tourism futures. The article highlights the successes and failures of their future visions across 20 tourism sectors, through 55 tourism forecasts. The reasons for weaknesses in some of their forecasts, and their foresight in highlighting little known issues are explored, along with key learning points for tourism futurists.Research limitations/implicationsThe future visions of UK tourism were tested against data and other evidence, but this was not always possible. Therefore, the success or failures of some of the visions are based on the authors’ judgement.Originality/valueOver the past 50 years, there has been a steady growth in tourism futures studies. Given the recent increase in awareness of history in driving futures thinking, perhaps now is the time to apply this viewpoint to previously published tourism futures studies because such reviews provide a timely reminder of the transient nature of tourism futures gazing.

Building Scenarios With the Three Tomorrows

Postnormal times, as a concept and as a theory, was conceived in a futures studies context by futurists, yet there have some doubts regarding its applicability when engaging in actual futures research. The arrival of Sardar and Sweeney’s article “The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times” seemed to provide the missing method. Yet, despite the authors’ claim, the three tomorrows is not a method, nor does their article explain how to develop the tomorrows. However, it is possible to build future scenario using the three tomorrows not as a method but as an approach. As an approach, the three tomorrows offer a general structure in which it is possible to undertake a futures research. To prove it, this article presents a three-stage process that can help any researcher construct scenarios following the tenets of postnormal times theory.

Teaching Futures Studies From Disciplinary And Student Perspectives

Concepts from the Enlightenment and the historical origins of modern social sciences are used to discuss how futures studies deserves recognition as a social science in its own right and as a needed component of the curricula of other disciplines as well, especially in public administration. In focus groups, undergraduate students who had just completed a course in futures studies identified what they would emphasize if they become teachers of our field. They would emphasize critical thinking, individual relevance and empowerment, interrelatedness, technology as a two-sided agent of change, a risk management approach to understanding crises and opportunities, past efforts to anticipate possible futures, developing scenarios using the Societal, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political framework, environmental scanning and backcasting, and especially the importance of Enlightenment values in framing preferred futures. As teachers, they would use technology extensively but were sharply divided on whether futures studies should be taught in an online only format.