Backcasting
Origin: Lat. scenarĭum, anticipatĭo, -ōnis
A tool in which an envisioned future is linked to today by imagining sequential cause and effect steps that lead back from the imagined future to today’s situation. The imagined future is often normative, that is, a desirable future state, and backcasting is conducted in order to identify plausible paths from that desirable future back to the present. Early backcasting exercises were performed by Elise Boulding. The conceptual inverse of foresight, this approach offers a way to envision a desirable future and then, working back from that future image, determine what must have happened in order for that state to be achieved. This approach begins with a description of a future situation and with the question as to how that situation can be reached through logically following the chains of causality from the future state back to the present.
Spanish: Anticipación,Escenario de anticipación
Sources and references
- Destatte, Philippe y Philippe Durance “Les mot-clés de la prospective territoriale”cited 56 times
- Institute for Alternartive Futures “Wiser Futures Workshop Compendium: Using futures tools to better understand and create the future”cited 31 times
- Cornish, Edward. “Futuring: The Exploration of the Future.”cited 13 times
- Global Foresight.org: http://www.globalforesight.org/glossaryview
- Gutiérrez, Miguel Ángel. “Estudios de Futuros: Glosario.”view
- Gordon, Theodore J. and Jerome C. Glenn .”Integration, comparisons and frontiers of FR Methods“,Futures Research Methodology V.3 The Millennium Projectcited 18 times
Term connections
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