Democrisis: Imagining New Futures with Foresight
Webinar for Council of Europe
A futures talk exploring democratic fragility through megatrends, scenarios, and futures literacy, designed to help participants expand what they see as possible, and strengthen their ability to act with intention.
Challenge
Democracy is being shaped by overlapping pressures: geopolitical instability, information disorder, polarisation, and rising inequality, with many people feeling that everything is political, while collective action is harder to sustain.
The challenge for the webinar was not to “diagnose democracy” in abstract terms, but to help participants hold complexity without collapsing into fatalism. That meant offering a structured way to:
Interpret democratic stress as part of larger systemic shifts
Imagine alternative futures (beyond present-day inevitabilities)
Reconnect futures thinking to agency and decision quality
Approach
The talk was built as a guided futures journey:
1) Framing: why futures matter for democracy
We introduced futures thinking as a practical capability and positioned futures as “mirrors” that help refresh mental models, challenge assumptions, and overcome short-termism.
Participants were invited into futures literacy as a simple arc: reveal plausible/preferable futures, reframe assumptions, then rethink & act through new questions and habits.
2) The forces shaping “democrisis”: megatrends + democratic signals
To anchor the conversation in real dynamics, we mapped the topic through ANTICIPATE’s global megatrends (e.g., Emerging World Order, Blurring Realities, Wealth Polarization, Artificial Revolution, Collapsing Ecosystems).
We used concrete examples and data points from the deck to show how democratic conditions are shifting, including democratic backsliding and youth dissatisfaction with democracy.
3) Scenarios: three 2035 worlds as “thinking tools”
We then invited participants to step into three contrasting futures for Europe in 2035:
Fortress Europe (security-first, more closed governance)
Eurosion (fragmentation and accelerating erosion)
Democratic Renaissance (revitalised participation and stronger democratic models)
These scenarios were used to make trade-offs discussable: what gets prioritised, what gets lost, and what would need to change to move toward more resilient democratic futures.
Outcomes
1) A shared language to discuss democratic futures without defaulting to doom
Participants gained structured ways to connect democratic challenges to deeper systems dynamics, rather than treating them as isolated events.
2) Scenario-based reflection that surfaced real trade-offs
The three 2035 worlds created productive tension: security vs freedom, cohesion vs fragmentation, participation vs control, helping participants articulate what they stand for and what they fear.
3) Futures literacy as a practical leadership capability
The session left participants with usable concepts and tools (megatrend sensemaking, mental model shifts, scenario reframing) that can be applied in strategy, policy, civic innovation, or organisational leadership.
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