Purpose - This paper introduces Foresight as a structured approach that is increasingly employed across industries and disciplines for anticipating future change and proposes its utility for the heritage sector. We illustrate how integrating greater Foresight into heritage practice can encourage proactive engagement with emerging trends; develop resilient strategies for heritage research, planning and management; and locate where heritage-based actions can bring transformative change for both communities and societies.

Design/methodology/approach - This paper presents research undertaken as part of the Alliance for Cultural Heritage Research in Europe (ARCHE) to inform a new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda. We analysed foresight and future-oriented publications from a range of disciplines to consolidate insights on current and emerging trends across sectors and global regions and to understand the heritage sector's engagement with Foresight approaches thus far.

Findings - The analysis identifies several drivers shaping our existing and future landscape and their implications for heritage research and practice. It also highlights opportunities for action where heritage can have a vital role in shaping futures and catalysing societal benefits. To conclude, the paper discusses gaps in the current body of heritage foresight research and identifies avenues to produce a more robust corpus to reflect a greater diversity of perspectives.

Originality/value - As the present study corroborates, the cultural heritage sector has had little engagement with foresight methods, despite the acute relevance of the future to heritage concepts and praxis.

This paper introduces ways of approaching heritage as future-oriented through the concepts of hope and potentiality. The future is today increasingly being described in dystopian terms, related to multiple global crises. In these times, the capacity to take a proactive stand towards more hopeful futures – even if they may seem beyond likelihood – is more needed than ever. By connecting several fields that seldom meet, this paper develops a way of conceptualising heritage that is focused on how it can serve as a vehicle to imagine and move towards hopeful futures. The study draws upon and connect relevant ideas and concepts from critical futures studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and heritage studies. The paper argues that through attempts of redeeming past potentials that persist as ghosts haunting the present, heritage can stimulate actions towards hopeful futures. Even when past potentials can never be fully realised, partial realisation tends to breed new hope. This conceptualisation of heritage is not focused on restoration by using an idealised past as a blueprint for a better future. Instead, it is a critical and reflective way of using heritage to carve out a future of radical difference and invest such a future with hope.

Many parts of Europe are today facing a wide range of societal and environmental challenges that demand a high degree of resilience and adaptability. Archaeology has an important role to play by providing novel perspectives on how people have been living with, and adapting to, change in dynamic environments over considerable time. This paper adopts a trans-chronological perspective on human-environment interaction in the Syltholm Fjord on the Danish island of Lolland. The area provides extraordinary archives of long-term data on the environmentand human activity in a dynamic and changing landscape. The fjord,which has been inhabited for several millennia, has been prone to regular flooding. We focus on three topics: (1) Habitation and subsistence, (2) Ritual behaviour and burial, and (3) Responses to dynamic environmental challenges and opportunities. From these topics, we identify a set of key-insights related to how to be resilient through disruptive societal and environmental changes.

 The purpose of this paper is to achieve a better understanding of teachers’ needs and challenges when participating in museums’ digital, hybrid, or blended educational programmes and resources in a post-pandemic reality. The paper also investigates the conditions that exist at different schools to enable participation and the use of the museum’s offer. Results from ten interviews with teachers in Småland, Öland, and Jämtland Härjedalen in Sweden are presented, and the results are analysed through the theoretical lens of the postdigital. This study shows the importance of digital/analogue and blended/hybrid museum programmes being planned, designed, and implemented with interactive affordances. Furthermore, it is suggested that insights and methods derived from transmedia storytelling could be used by museum educators to a larger extent, in order to move towards a more interactive and co-creative pedagogy. Finally, the results demonstrate that museums and schools have much to gain from working closer together to move towards what can be called a postdigital pedagogy.

This entry looks at strategies of coping with a site of difficult heritage. It does this by focusing on the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo, a much-contested monument associated to the 1389 Kosovo Battle. The premise is that temporalities lie at the core of negotiating difficult heritage. This entry shows how temporalities of heritage can be actively produced as well as challenged, and that such production or challenge manifests itself through ways of engaging or not engaging with heritage. The Gazimestan monument connects to several temporalities that are instrumentalized in different coping strategies, such as temporal distancing, trivialization/banalization, and avoidance. On occasion, they are instrumentalized to create a sense of temporal collapse, making the distant past seem close and urgent. Other times, they are instrumentalized to create a sense of temporal divide, where the monument is positioned into a distant and harmless past. Unraveling the temporalities of difficult heritage is thus crucial to better understand the constant negotiation of how it is made and unmade as heritage, as well as its implications for the present and the future.

This report constitutes a first attempt to map volunteer management practices in the  Nordic archives sector, that is, in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. We have  unfortunately not been able to include Iceland in this study, but it would be relevant  to include in future studies. This has been done through a survey broadly distributed  within the archive sector, as well as additional in-depth follow-up interviews. The  main purposes have been to achieve a better understanding of how and to what  extent archives in Scandinavia engage with volunteers, different attitudes towards  volunteer work and what it entails, and perhaps most importantly, identify needs  within the archive sector in the purpose of developing educational material and other  types of useful resources. We have also been examining the reasons why some  archives have not started working with volunteers, and what would be required to  help these archives take the first step in case of expressed interest. Through the  results, some comparisons between countries can be made. However, it is important  to highlight that, while we received 121 answers to the survey (Denmark: 33, Finland:  21, Norway: 44, Sweden: 23), there were of course many archives who did not  answer. Comparisons and analysis need to be made carefully, and certain  interpretations will be tentative in nature. This is a first attempt at mapping the  volunteer landscape at archives in Nordic countries, and we hope it can serve as an  inspiration and basis for further research.

Strategic Foresight describes a set of approaches, tools and skills that help organizations explore, envision and shape the future. Foresight does not attempt to predict the future per se, but rather seeks to build an awareness of different possible futures for an organization or sector – challenging assumptions and expanding horizons. Conventional strategic planning tends to take a “business-as-usual” approach, extrapolating likely futures from past trends over a short-term horizon. Foresight, by contrast, looks out over a longer horizon – anything from ten to more than 50 years ahead – and engages with change in a more creative way to map out future contexts.

Through provoking deeper thinking about the nature, drivers and implications of change, Foresight uses the future to help surface critical decisions to take in the present. This helps to strengthen anticipation, enabling organizations to develop more “future proof” forward-thinking strategies, thus building adaptability and resilience.

In July 2021, as part of its Foresight Initiative, ICCROM launched a horizon scan study to gather intelligence about possible macro-environmental changes that might affect cultural heritage in the future. To undertake this work, the project engaged an interdisciplinary team of 18 researchers and two advisors from different world regions who collectively generated over 60 research reports looking out over a 15-year horizon.

The study intends to serve as a starting point for an ongoing foresight process to inform the development of ICCROM’s longer-term strategy, and particularly its strategic orientations for the next planning cycle (2026–2031).

Although the study was primarily for internal purposes, nevertheless in light of the potential usefulness of this approach for other organizations, we decided to publish this report. It is our sincere hope that this may inspire other groups and organizations working in the cultural heritage field to embark upon their own Foresight journey.

In the Nordplus Adult development project Increased Learning Through Social Spaces (2018-2022) we collected examples of social interactions  at cultural heritage organisations in Scandinavia which contributed to interactivity  and learning. In addition, we analysed how cultural heritage  organisations actively create social spaces with the intention of promoting  learning opportunities and how they evaluate these learning opportunities.  Based on the examples, we developed a hypothesis on how various  elements can create social interactivity and learning. By departing from  research literature such as museum studies (Falk & Dierking, 2013) and  lifelong learning (Jarvis, 2017), combined with the British planning and  evaluation tool Generic Learning Outcomes (Graham, 2013) and a methodological  approach departing from action research (Torbert, 2004; Ulvik  et al., 2022), we developed a foundation for a new continuing education  programme for museum staff on learning through social spaces. This programme  was developed during the project period and tested and evaluated  in September 2021 in Östersund, Sweden, on Scandinavian museum staff.  In this chapter, we analyse the development of the continuing education  for museum staff in Scandinavia and present the test and evaluation  results. The evaluation programme consisted of an electronic survey distributed  to the course participants before and after the course, as well as  observations during the course, discussions with the participants during  the course and a concluding evaluation based on the Generic Learning  Outcomes evaluation tool. By departing from educational practice, the  Scandinavian research group will implicitly seek to answer the symposia  question related to what the societal challenges are and how these looks  like from the perspective of heritage institutions. The research group will  seek to answer the question related to what possibilities that are generated  for heritage institutions. Finally, the group answers the question of how  adult education and learning related to heritage institutions might develop  because of these challenges and possibilities by, for example, engaging in  new professional development or through the development of new professions related to cultural heritage organisations.

This book is directed toward museum professionals who want to expand and innovate their work in outreach through digital means. Learning, participation, and co-creation are central concepts in the book. The book is relevant for people holding different capacities at the museum: especially museum educators, exhibition producers, communicators, and museum directors. This does not mean that only museum professionals would find the book useful. What works in a museum context can often be adjusted to other contexts as well. Everyone is welcome to read the book and hopefully find inspiration and new perspectives. 

The purpose of the book is to provide food for thought in how to work with digital tools in outreach, and on occasion, to challenge old ways of working and thinking[LR1]  in museums. It is most often the capacity to imagine how to do things differently, rather than the limitations of the technology per se, that poses the greatest challenge to museums in an increasingly digital, or even postdigital, society. Focus will primarily be on how digital technology can help museum professionals stimulate active participation and co-creation with an audience. We do not only address completely online pedagogical programs, but we are also looking at how the digital can enhance the outcome and offer a new pedagogy in the museum – a (post)digital pedagogy.

The aim of Task 2.1 was to explore and better understand the future landscape in which the ARCHE alliance will operate, in order to orient and inform a future-facing Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda. This was realised through a peer reviewed Foresight study, supplemented by a literature study of research strategies and future and emerging technologies, and a stakeholder workshop. 

The study examined how different fields are anticipating the future using Strategic Foresight as a key means to understanding future needs and considerations. Through an exercise of data gathering and analysis, this study examined indications to different possible futures, and the implications these may have for heritage in the EU context, derived from a body of future-oriented literature spanning sectors such as the environment, economics, health and education, as well as arts and culture, and heritage. 

This report presents the findings of this peer-reviewed literature review, outlining identified megatrends, cross-cutting themes and opportunities for action for the heritage sector. It also analysed the ways in which Foresight is used and how similar approaches might benefit future strategy development for heritage.