**2. Methodology**

### *2.1. Overall Methodology*

To analyse changes in daily living and in stakeholders' roles, we first conducted a literature review to determine how the foresight approach could be used in the participatory process to transition to sustainable lifestyles. This review employed an interdisciplinary approach combining foresight studies and sustainable lifestyles research. We aimed to demonstrate how the knowledge gained from these two fields could help empower citizens and other stakeholders to engage in policy formation through a participatory foresight process. Second, we analysed the results of a global expert survey in terms of foresighted changes in daily living between now and 2050 to understand why and how citizens' participation and an intrinsic foresight approach, which empowers citizens in a democratic decision-making process [8], are necessary to better use foresight in policymaking toward sustainable lifestyles. Using the results on foresighted changes in consumption, infrastructure, work and education, and physical and mental well-being, the analysis focused on identifying the determining factors that could shape future sustainable lifestyles to be considered in the public discussions. The survey results show a diverse set of possibilities for future lifestyles and they illustrate how participatory foresight exercises could empower people to engage in the topic of future lifestyles to make tangible changes in their daily living. Third, we analysed how stakeholders would change from two aspects: Their changing roles and their future strengths and positiveness as considered by the respondents in terms of the implications of future sustainability. This analysis was used to derive factors for consideration related to stakeholder participation in the foresight process for future sustainable lifestyles and their potential roles in the transition towards desired futures. Finally, we combined the results of the literature review and survey analysis to propose participatory foresight processes that are useful for envisioning future sustainable lifestyles.

### *2.2. The Global Survey and Its Analysis*

This study analysed primary data collected in the *Global Foresight Survey of Potential Changes in Society by 2050: Perspectives of Research Institutes and NGOs*, which was designed by this paper's authors. The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly implemented the survey between 25 January and 28 February 2018. The free-text survey targeted 1200 authors of selected journals in the field of future studies: *Futures (300), Journal of Futures Studies (300), Technological Forecasting and Social Change (300), International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy (100), World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research (100), International Journal of Forecasting (50), and Risk Analysis (50)*. An additional 300 authors were identified through a search of the following keywords on ScienceDirect and JSTOR: 'Foresight Study', 'Foresight 2050, 'Future Foresight', 'Future Scenarios', and 'Futures Studies'. The survey received 137 valid responses, with the valid response rate of about 9%. Based on the online survey software, it showed that each valid respondent spends an average of approximately 30 min filling out the survey.

Looking at a ffiliation, 84% of respondents were from research institutes or universities; 9% were from non-governmental/not-for-profit organisations, 5% were from the private sector or consultants, and 2% were from the governmen<sup>t</sup> sector. The respondents covered a wide scope of knowledge/expertise. There were more respondents with knowledge on the regions of Europe (55%) and Asia-Pacific (31%). A substantial number of respondents were knowledgeable on the remaining regions, including North America (26%), Africa and the Middle East (20%), and Latin America and the Caribbean (17%). A large proportion of respondents either did not focus on specific regions or they focused on the global level (40%). For respondents' research and project areas, they covered a wide range of areas, with respondents allowed to select multiple answers: environment (55% selected this), economy (46%), energy and

resource (43%), governance (35%), social policy (33%), natural science and technology (30%), education (28%), international development (21%), health (18%), foreign policy and international a ffairs (10%), defence and national security (4%), and others (32%). Additional details on the respondents are published in a discussion paper [14].

The survey questions were divided into three parts focusing on changes between now and 2050. Part 1 looked at overall society (culture and social norms, demography, economy, the environment and natural resources, governance structure, and technology and innovation), Part 2 was on the nine domains of lifestyles, and Part 3 focused on the roles of selected stakeholders. The nine domains in Part 2 included five consumption-based domains—food, consumption of manufactured goods, mobility, housing, and leisure [16]—and four non-consumption–based domains measuring people's well-being in terms of work, education, health, and social connections and relationships [17]. In Part 3, the survey provided six stakeholders that are frequently discussed in the literature on sustainability transition: Civil society, governments, households and individuals, local communities, the private sector, and research communities. A comprehensive analysis of the results from Parts 1 and 2 has been published by the authors of this paper [8,14]. This paper focuses on the analysis in Parts 2 and 3.

For this paper, the survey results were analysed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The free-text answers on foresighted changes to daily living and stakeholders' roles were first manually labelled by categories of change. To ensure consistency, the given labels were mutually confirmed by two of the authors. Then, the frequency of some labels' presence was summarised in tables for changes in daily living (Sections 4.1.1–4.1.4) and in bar charts for the strengths of stakeholders and the positiveness of futures related to stakeholders' changing roles (Sections 4.2.1 and 4.2.2). Additionally, the foresighted changes in the strengths of stakeholders and positiveness of futures were manually labelled into three levels (stronger, neutral, weaker for strengths; positive, neutral, negative for positiveness) and were cross-analysed and visualised as a mosaic plot (Section 4.2.2). The results of the quantitative analysis were interpreted and supplemented using qualitative analysis, referring to examples of free-text answers from the survey to understand both overall trends and specific context among the survey responses.

### **3. Literature Review on Foresight's Role in the Policy Process**

Future-oriented thinking is pivotal to achieve sustainable lifestyles by 2050. Existing scholarly discourse on sustainable lifestyles tends to focus on a consumption-based domain approach, which has the advantage of measuring environmental impacts such as carbon footprint, as demonstrated by [5–7,18]. Analysis of consumption-based environmental impacts or the footprint perspective provides quantitative evidence for progressive policy actions targeting long-term sustainability [6,19,20]. However, there is more to a person's lifestyle than just consumption. Aspects of day-to-day life—such as education, work, health, and social connections and relationships—also contribute significantly to determining one's level of well-being [14]. Additionally, emerging trends and disruptive changes in society are likely to shape future lifestyles, such as an increase in displaced populations due to climate change, the role of social networking services in human connections and relationships, and the disruption caused by robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in employment. These should be incorporated into long-term policy design targeting a transition to sustainable lifestyles [8,14].

Calof and Smith [21] describe foresight's policy impacts include value statements by key actors, foresight's roles in the public arena (such as awareness-raising), project design to meet stakeholder needs, outputs of new knowledge in strategy-making, and policy formulation and delivery. The di fferent phases of foresight—design, implementation, result generation, interpretation, and results and policy formulation—are all vital steps to impact policy [21]. Applying foresight in policymaking has two major areas of value: Instrumental and intrinsic [8]. Earlier foresight research and practices weigh more on the instrumental side, focusing on 'strategic' and 'scientific' aspects and allowing the decision-making process to be supported by scientific knowledge with insights from interdisciplinary experts in policymaking. By contrast and from an intrinsic perspective, foresight enables policymaking to be

a more democratic process that engages diverse actors such as industry, civil society, and ordinary citizens to influence policy directions before implementation. This inclusive participatory element is important in shaping the decision-making process.

Foresight has been used in di fferent countries for policymaking through government-initiated foresight programmes, particularly on technology and innovation. Such programmes were initiated in the United States and Japan, followed by Western European countries, in the 1990s [22]. Recently, foresight initiatives have been implemented by more countries in di fferent regions; these initiatives have also been initiated by non-governmen<sup>t</sup> actors, such as United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)'s Technology Foresight Initiative in Latin America [23] providing those countries with support on technology and innovation-led policy formulation. Government-led foresight programmes have an advantage in that they are embedded within the governmen<sup>t</sup> agencies and, thus, directly feed into the policy process. However, agenda-setting on foresight also tends to be determined by governmen<sup>t</sup> interests—such as national security [15,24] or technology and innovation in industries [25]—instead of topics that are more relevant to ordinary citizens' lifestyles. Moreover, the stakeholders involved tend to be experts, industry representatives, and policymakers without the involvement of the general public. The public is generally only informed through outreach programmes communicating the foresight outcomes [26]. Thus, the general public and other key actors are often underrepresented in the process despite foresight's enormous potential e ffect on them [25]. It has also been argued that those setting the agenda on foresight tend to shape the research results and development agenda [27], limiting the discourse on futures to a predetermined framework [28]. In such a setting, foresight serves as an instrument for those actors to reach a consensus rather than being applied to search for alternatives [29].

Addressing the shortcomings in government-led foresight requires that more stakeholders, including the general public, be invited to discuss futures, thereby ensuring the empowerment of citizens [28,30–32]. Citizen participatory foresight is particularly significant in the search for long-term sustainability, which requires systemic structural changes. In this approach, foresight's intrinsic aspect of empowerment to serve the democratic decision-making process is more valuable than its strategic aspect. Inviting marginalised stakeholders or citizens into the foresight process shifts the discourse when setting the agenda, ensures that foresight's proposed policy solutions include 'fundamental changes in the system' [28], and involves these actors to engage and shape the future they want [33]. In this way, foresight is well placed to empower underrepresented actors in the policymaking process [29] using topics that are tangible and familiar to their lifestyles and extending these topics to broader socioeconomic issues surrounding these individuals [13]. Consequently, adopting the concept of 'sustainable lifestyles' in participatory foresight could open the discussion to revisit public policymaking as a method to improve people's quality of life and to empower the public to become agents shaping their own lifestyles through foresight. In this context, this research aims to contribute to participatory foresight in the topic of sustainable lifestyles from two aspects: To analyse the foresighted changes in daily living to understand weaknesses in the current mainstream approach of foresight; and to generate increased understanding on the changing roles of stakeholders in future society. This should be taken into consideration when looking at stakeholder involvement for foresight exercises and when forming collective actions towards shared sustainable lifestyles.

### **4. Survey Result and Analysis**

In terms of policy formation through the participatory foresight process to transition to long-term sustainability, our analysis of the survey results focused on two elements: (1) Determining factors in shaping future lifestyles from four aspects (consumption, infrastructure, work and education, and physical and mental health); and (2) the changing roles of di fferent stakeholders (governments, the private sector, research communities, civil society, local communities, and households and individuals). Among the four aspects of future lifestyles, there are 258 changes reported in total with the following distributions as illustrated in Figure 1: 53 in consumption (32 in food, 21 in manufactured

goods), 44 in infrastructure (36 in mobility, 8 in housing), 77 in work and education (47 in work, 30 in education), and 71 in physical and mental health (38 in health, 25 in social connection and relationships, 8 in leisure). There were 13 responses reported as other domains that are excluded from this analysis. The results and analysis in this section supplement the current discourse on sustainable lifestyles and foresight studies, providing directions for policy formation for the long-term transition to sustainable lifestyles. A more detailed analysis of the survey results related to the foresighted changes in society and daily living between now and 2050 has been published as a discussion paper [14], and analysis focused on the technology aspect of foresight has been published in a research article [8].

**Figure 1.** Lifestyles domains in daily living selected by the respondents. Notes: Lifestyle domains in daily living selected by the respondents in the *Global Foresight Survey of Potential Changes in Society by 2050: Perspectives of Research Institutes and NGOs*. Numbers are counts of valid responses. Percentages are the share in total responses. Valid responses only. N = 258.

### *4.1. Changes in Four Aspects of Lifestyle*
