Foster Newsletter #4

FOSTER

FOSTER is an ambitious Horizon Europe-funded project that will build food system capabilities, knowledge and new governance mechanisms for scientists, citizens and policymakers. FOSTER will gain insight into how knowledge and innovation systems (K&I) can be adapted, made more inclusive, better governed, and equipped to transform Europe’s food system, capable to address the emerging challenges of nourishing Europe in a healthy and sustainable way.

Dear Reader, we´d like you to enjoy our Newsletter #4 and get some useful information about our recent and upcoming work!

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FOSTER Platform

Horizon Scanning activities
We would like to share with you some knowledge and findings from the Horizon Scanning activities, done by the project members. The Horizon Scanning was mainly a joint effort of the FOSTER Team with our CDIs starting in 2023 and finishing in February 2024. We used a framework concept (see figure 1) adapted from Foresight4Food and adjusted it according to our findings and sources. We then searched for ongoing or expected developments – in scientific sources and other foresight studies. We then asked the CDIs to select, which kind of knowledge could be interesting and helpful for them (as short voting) and also asked them to add and reframe according to their knowledge requirements. The findings are thus very selective and will be used in the next phase of FOSTER (sense-making) to work with our CDIs and to go through a process to find a topic for a potential “new CDI”. Some topics are already available on the website, and you may try it out clicking on icons

Food System Context Scenarios work
The FOSTER Context Scenario Process started in 2023. With context, we mean the environment of food systems. Based on other scenario processes and our Horizon Scanning results, we discussed the factors that frame future food systems in a workshop with CDIs and other consortium members. We identified the key factors, formulated assumptions about their potential future developments and performed a Scenario Sprint to combine the different assumptions to scenarios of or until the year 2040. The fourth workshop of the series was about discussing the first 4 raw scenarios and finetuning them. It turned out that we need two additional scenarios. The six resulting scenarios are:
• Trade alliances and soft regulation foster sustainability;
• Shocks unite Europe in a joint post-growth future;
• No collective responsibility;
• Towards an EU of autocrats, nationalism and economic turmoil;
• Slowly moving towards a sustainable EU in a fragmented world;
• Green local and regional ecosystems managing nature to fulfil major services.
You are welcome to see the descriptions here.

Summer School 2024 – “Foresight and scenarios for food system transformation”
The 2nd Summer School of FOSTER was held in Barcelona on May 22nd – May 24th 2024! The 3-day meeting was organised by the University of Oxford and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research with the participation of academic partners and CDIs. The objectives of this year´s Summer School were:
• To recap on food systems thinking and foresight approaches;
• To explore examples of food systems foresight methods;
• To apply food system methods for CDIs` activities;
• To reflect on foresight methods in relation to CDIs´ activities and action plans.
Within three days of the event, participants could expand their knowledge about foresight thinking, apply some tools in practice and reflect on the work done during these days.

We brought some useful tools to the CDIs’ tables to test system thinking and foresight methods in practice. The so-called “scaffolding” approach included:
– Mental Time travel: Personal trip into a future scenario or single situation to look around;
– Tetralemma: This tool is helpful for thinking about different assumptions for or paths into the future. The steps are to think: A) THE ONE, commonly assumed future, mainstream, dominant assumption, B) THE OTHER opposite, deviant assumption, C) BOTH, a combination, a future in between the first assumptions, D) NEITHER … NOR, a disruption or revolutionary assumption, and E) WILDCARD, a completely new and disruptive situation (maybe the original question becomes irrelevant);
– Rich pictures of the current system: These are pictorial descriptions of how actors currently see their food system and its issues. Participants had created Rich Pictures in the previous Summer School;
– Transformation statements: are the formulation of a hypothetical future situation (here of a CDI) that is a desired one and has a time frame, formulated in present tense. It includes: Do what: intervention, By when: date, How: method, Why: to achieve project goal and ends up with a clear statement in less than 20 words;

– BATWOVE: is a sequence of steps and issues to consider when thinking about the desired future/transformation statement (here of a CDI). The following items have to be analysed: Who are the Beneficiaries of the proposed transformation, who are the Actors, the Transformation, what is the underlying Worldview of the transformation, who are the Owners of the transformation, who are the Victims of the transformation and what Environmental constraints might the transformation face?
– Using Scenarios: in FOSTER, we had a scenario building process to generate and formulate context scenarios of the world or the environment around food systems from a European Union perspective. The scenarios were introduced once more and each CDI had to place itself, its own future and its own transformation statement into these different scenarios (during the workshop, we only had time for two different scenarios);
– Backwards planning: In a table, CDIs started in the future with the transformation statement and its time horizon. Then each CDI systematically went back to the present, describing actions and conditions to achieve each previous step or milestone. This method trains backwards thinking from a goal to be achieved and can be widened into planning steps later.