European countries are facing increasingly complex challenges that require the capacity to anticipate change, govern complexity and long-term policy issues, look beyond the immediate, and anticipate disruptions before they become crises.
A growing body of scholarship has begun to consolidate around anticipatory governance as a systematic effort to embed long-term thinking, future awareness, and preparedness into the structures and routines of public decision-making. Rather than treating the future as an exogenous element to be absorbed, anticipatory governance reframes it as an object of deliberation and institutional design encompassing both the analytical capacities that allow governments to explore alternative futures and stress-test policy assumptions (notably through strategic foresight) and the opening of governance processes to broader participation.
This panel starts from the premise that long-term governance is simultaneously an analytical, institutional, and democratic challenge. Anticipatory practices are emerging at the EU level and within the public sector more broadly, in which organizations facilitate collective sense-making under uncertainty, enable coordinated action around shared visions of possible futures, and strengthen organizational resilience (Sakellariou & Vecchiato, 2022; De Vito, 2024). Yet, their effectiveness depends on the quality of participation, the strength of institutional embedding, and the political conditions under which long-term perspectives can gain traction against short-term pressures foresight exercises risk remaining decoupled from decision-making unless they are treated as genuine sources of evidence for policymaking (De Vito & Taffoni, 2026).
We invite submissions that address any aspect of governing for the long term in the face of complex challenges, including but not limited to the European member states, to specific policies of climate adaptation, environmental governance, sustainable development, public health preparedness, intergenerational fairness, and the governance of socio-technical transitions. We particularly welcome contributions that examine anticipatory or future-oriented governance arrangements and their institutional conditions, participatory and inclusive approaches to long-term policymaking, the role of strategic foresight, scenarios and future-oriented analysis within the policy cycle, how public organizations build adaptive capacity and resilience, and the politics of embedding long-term perspectives in governance systems shaped by short-term incentives. Both empirical and conceptual contributions are encouraged, as are works that use public policy and policy analysis frameworks.
