The governmental approaches to the long term or ‛future’ played a key role in defining state rationalities and their capacity to analyse and deal with change. While focusing on the French case, this contribution seeks to makes a general argument about the shifting future capacity of the state as a way of understanding key transitions in governmental power.
The long term emerged as a governmental category in the 1960s and 1970s through the rise of instruments dealing with issues of uncertainty and complexity within the state itself, due to increasing problems of coordination between policy areas and the different temporalities of state action. Such instruments did not disappear with the demise of planning, but travelled from central places in the planning process into more distant, independent, or hybrid locations (thinktanks or research institutes).
In France, prospective, ie systematic foresight, was integrated in the Plan in the late 1960s and early 70s. Since then, it experienced a continuous restructuring, which can be interpreted in terms of a general change of contemporary states’ foresight capacity in the shift from the strong to the regulatory or the strategic state (Bezes, 2005). The production of prospective and their political effects always represented a challenge for the centre of the state. As a tool dealing with issues of uncertainty and complexity, the bureaucratic production of ‛futures’ strongly tackles the ability of modern state to steer the production of ‛state intelligence’ and policy change. Affected by the rationalization of state administration and policy making, this activity undergoes a growing politicization and centralization. It may reinact a form of future legibility in a decentralised system in need of new instruments to steer a multitude of actors in a multi-level governance system or even create a level of oversight of the complexity of decentralised state action.
