Strategic foresight as a tool for strategic management in the public sector

Despite governments’ widely recognition of the importance of establishing an anticipatory governance approach in policymaking, the concrete integration of future-oriented knowledge into strategy development does not appear widely implemented in the public sector. Existing literature on strategic management (SM) in the public sector appears to be focusing predominantly on strategic planning (SP) which has been elevated mistakenly to pre-eminence respect to the other components of SM, namely strategic thinking, and strategy development. This mistake generates the second order effect of leaving out of the equation strategic foresight (SF), a key strategy tool (ST) widely recognized in the extant literature on SM focusing on the private sector, but almost neglected in the public management literature. The investigation focused on how strategic foresight itself is being carried out within the public sector, to identify which elements of practice could be positively or negatively affecting the way the future-oriented outputs generated by SF are accepted and used in the public sector. The objective of this research had no ambition to validate or verify pre-existing theories and conceptual frameworks on SM and strategy tools in the academic literature on public management, but rather to explore and discover key concepts and hypotheses that could potentially complement them, and eventually lead to their evolution and integration with concepts pertaining SF Data collection was conducted within the framework of grounded theory, preceded by a systematic literature review, and carried out using an in-depth case study in two distinct phases, first through observations gathered between 2012 and 2014, and subsequently through semi-structured interviews carried out eight years after the case, between 2019 and 2022. The data analysis led the researcher to identify ten elements of SF practice that appear to potentially enable or constrain both the quality of the SF outcomes and its integration in the strategy development process of public organizations. The thesis concludes providing a working definition of behavioral public open foresight, an integrated conceptual framework aimed at fostering the integration of SF into the behavioral public strategy research stream, and last but not least, some practice-oriented recommendations that governments and their public administrations may wish to consider to better integrate SF in their policymaking processes, to ensure that the future-oriented outputs produced by SF have an impact and contribute to the strategy development process they have been produced to inform, both within their own countries and through collaboration with non governmental and international organizations.