Community Foresight: Adapting Foresight for Enhancing Local Democracy and Addressing Situations of Unsustainability

Global challenges such as climate change, fake news, populism, polarization, and conflict increasingly affect local communities. Despite these challenges, local communities have limited access to existing methodologies, such as foresight processes, that help actors better understand trends, prepare for different scenarios, and co-create desired futures. This paper relies on participatory action research to adapt foresight methodology for local community contexts. The paper is based on data harvested in 2024 and 2025 when a network of 20 Romanian organizations (the Community Foresight Network) co-created a guide for community foresight. The paper provides an analysis of the dynamics among organizations and the generated content. Furthermore, relying on grounded theory, the paper explores at a conceptual level the implications of engaging communities in foresight processes and the potential for strengthening democratic practices and addressing situations of unsustainability in local contexts.