Generating knowledge for the use of policy-making, foresight shares a common ground of participative and policy-impacting challenges with the deliberative democracy theory.
The mainstreaming of foresight in DG RTD's policy making mechanism signals that foresight has reached some maturity as a decision support tool for research and innovation policy.
This qualifies social media an ideal solution for foresight policy making, even though depending on the digitalisation progress in a given society one must be aware to be stirring in a spectrum "from technocratic to democratic decision making" [24].
Such barriers should not deter those seeking to develop the role of strategic foresight in policy making, but acts as a reminder that the uptake of strategic foresight is not just dependent on demonstrations of proficiency, but a willingness and ability to engage with and shape questions of politics and power.
The assumption in developing and using Foresight in policy making is that the future cannot be fully predicted and thus all decision outcomes cannot be calculated in advance.
"The key notions related to foresight are policy making, public participation, learning, alternatives, complex socio-technical systems, and science-society relationships" [5].
In accounts advocating and explaining the potential and actual use of strategic foresight in policy making, attention is drawn to an increasingly complex, changing and uncertain environment and the appetite this has created for knowledge as to how best to prepare and manoeuvre in a brave new world [20, 21, 22].
The purpose of the study is to examine how domain experts look at the practice of foresight in general, and perceive its overall impact on policy making in particular, in the setting of Japanese foresight conducted in the past 15 years.
In this study, the perceptions of domain experts who participated in foresight activities on the impact on policy making are examined by conducting interviews and surveys on five previous foresights in Japan between 1996 and 2007.
However, as this article points out, social media are an ideal solution to support foresight and future-oriented policy making; therefore, the advantages of SMA for governments shall not be overlooked.
Foresight and forward-looking approaches in decision and policy making are becoming increasingly essential for governments.
