Digital Europe 2030: Designing scenarios for ICT in future governance and policy making Gianluca Misuraca ⁎, David Broster, Clara Centeno European Commission, JRC-IPTS, C/Inca Garcilaso 3, Seville 41092, Spain abstract article info Available online 11 September 2011 Keywords: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Governance Policy making Research Foresight Scenarios Modelling The article outlines a set of visionary scenarios on how the European society could develop by 2030 by using advanced ICT tools and modelling techniques and integrating them into governance processes and policy making mechanisms. These scenarios have been designed through a foresight exercise conducted by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) as part of the CROSSROAD Project, a support action of the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme. After presenting the conceptual framework and methodological approach followed, the scenario design framework developed and the resulting views of what the European Information Society might be by 2030 are presented. The article follows with a discussion of the implications of the scenarios design in terms of key areas of expected change and grand challenges to be addressed. It concludes by identifying policy challenges and proposing possible future research directions in the domain of ICT for governance and policy modelling needed to build a truly open Digital Europe twenty years from now. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 1.1. Background This article is based on the findings of the Scenario Design exercise conducted by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) 1 as part of the CROSSROAD Project, an FP7 Support Action implemented during 2010. 2 The main goal of CROSSROAD was to build a roadmap for future research in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for governance and policy modelling. 3 This roadmap aims to provide: a shared vision that inspires collaborative and interdisciplinary research between academia, business, civil society and government; and a useful tool for the support and orientation of future policy-making. Overall, the research aimed to push the boundaries of traditional e-Government research and help resolve the complex societal challenges Europe is facing by applying ICT-enabled innovations and collaborative policy model- ling approaches. For this purpose, it links very diverse research disciplines with practitioners' views and policy makers' concerns, through a multi-stakeholder and participatory approach (CROSS- ROAD, 2010a,b). 1.2. Justification Today's internet is already a remarkable catalyst for creativity, collaboration and innovation, providing opportunities that would have been impossible to imagine just two decades ago. If one had predicted then that, in 2010, children would freely access satellite images of any place on earth, interact with people from everywhere and search trillions of data with a simple click on their PCs, one would have been taken for fool (European Commission, 2009b). This research sets out to prepare a similar excursion into the future, by outlining a set of scenarios on how governance and policy making, supported and enhanced by the use of ICTs, could develop by 2030, in order to identify the policy challenges and research needs to be addressed. These efforts may also help the fool sound wise twenty years from now. Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) S121–S131 ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: + 34 954 488 208. E-mail addresses: gianluca.misuraca@ec.europa.eu (G. Misuraca), david.broster@ec.europa.eu (D. Broster), clara.centeno@ec.europa.eu (C. Centeno). 1 IPTS is one of the seven institutes of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) (http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu). 2 CROSSROAD — A Participative Roadmap for ICT Research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling (http://www.crossroad-eu.net). 3 According to the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme (Work Programme ICT 2009–2010) (European Commission and DG Research, 2009), ICT for governance and policy modelling joins two complementary research fields, which have traditionally been quite separate: the governance and participation toolbox which includes technologies such as mass conversation and collaboration tools; and the policy modelling domain which includes forecasting, agent-based modelling, simulation and visualisation. These ICT tools for governance and policy modelling aim to improve public decision-making in a complex age, enable policy-making and governance to become more effective and more intelligent, and accelerate the learning path embedded in the overall policy cycle (European Commission and DG-INFSO, 2008a). 0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2011.08.006 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf