Aiming for a sustainable future: conceptualizing public open foresight

ABSTRACT

Sustainability as a global challenge concerns actors across organizational and national boundaries. Meeting the complexity of the sustainability challenge requires collaboration between various stakeholders and strategies with long-term focus. Various authors propose foresight activities to enhance decisions related to strategies and innovations for a more sustainable future. We follow this call and suggest a new direction to be taken in public management concerning sustainability and investigate ‘public open foresight’: an inter-organizational discussion and analysis process of public sector organizations regarding future developments. This article applies open foresight to the public realm by presenting a process framework and outlining propositions for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• open foresight
• public management
• openness
• public open foresight

Acknowledgement

Both authors contributed equally to this work. We would like to thank Special Issue Editors Neil Boyd and Eric Martin and four anonymous PMR reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The network aimed to foster welfare of European society through positioning European countries as leaders in ICT innovation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Schmidthuber

Lisa Schmidthuber is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Public and Nonprofit Management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Among others, her research interests include open government and innovation management in the public sector.

Melanie Wiener

Melanie Wiener is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Strategic Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, where she teaches sustainability and globalization at the master level. Her research focuses among others on open innovation, corporate culture and (open) foresight in the corporate and public field.