Any forecast on what will happen in 40 years is very likely to be wrong. Still, forecasts or any kind of prospective studies play a certain role in legitimising decision-making. However, we believe that "ivory tower" future studies are outdated and that foresight must be understood as a way to integrate any kind of prospective exercise in an interactive process of planning and ecision making that involves experts and stakeholders.

Foresight is a process by which we come to a fuller understanding of the impact factors, drivers and dynamics shaping long-term future which should be taken into account in policy making.

In this situation a Foresight process is absolutely essential in looking into the future, but even more in constructing the future.

The goal of FREIGHTVISION's Foresight process is to bring together both experts and decision makers from research, industry, policy making and society and create thereby channels for communication and develop a better vision and action plan. This means that the project integrates the need for decision making and priority setting by policy makers and other stakeholders.

By doing so the following goals will be achieved:

• Alternative views about the future are collected
• A shared understanding of current problems and goals
• plausible scenarios shall support decision making
• a common understanding about "shaping the future"

From the point of view of Foresight implementation, we draw on the wide range of expertise of the cosnsortium to integrate the participatory process involving stakeholders, systematic future intelligence gathering and long-term vision building processes aimed at decision making and mobilising joint action.

The participatory process will mainly take place in the FREIGHTVISION Forums by active involvement of stakeholders and interaction with experts of the project team.

Stakeholders will be involved in all steps of the project from the identification of trends/divers/indicators, scenario development, multi-criteria analysis to the formulation of the vision for long-distance freight transport and the related action plan for transport policy, RTD-policy and demonstration projects. 

FREIGHTVISION Forums:

Within FREIGHTVISION the participatory aspects of the Foresight process are implemented by establishing FREIGHTVISION Forums.

The FREIGHTVISION Forum is a high level forum, where stakeholder meet four times to discuss intermediate results of the work packages and give directions for further development. Through the FREIGHTVISION Forum and its participative approach FREIGHTVISION's work will be influenced, mistakes can be corrected and future directions in the work can be defined.