Development of regional foresight studies between 2000 and 2019: an overview and co-citation analysis

Abstract

Regional foresight is one of the regional planning approaches that increase the ability to deal with uncertainty and changes. This study aims to provide an overview of regional foresight studies and domain map to evaluate their merits and defects and direct future studies in this field. For this purpose, 111 papers related to regional foresight were identified at the “Web of Science” in the period 2000 to 2019 and used as the basis for further analysis. These papers have been reviewed in various aspects. In addition, the domain map of regional foresight and its intellectual bases was drawn based on co-citation analysis of these papers and their 4194 references. The domain map includes five main clusters of research areas or intellectual bases for regional foresight: normative forecasting, participation, foresight in policy and strategy, innovation systems, and multi-level governance. Finally, the merits and defects of regional foresight studies are evaluated based on research results and some suggestions are provided for future studies.

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“…Furthermore, CF is a key instrument for battling uncertainty that has emerged as an important contributor in the face of accelerating change, high business environment unpredict- Furthermore, we saw that, after 2017, both evolutionary lines (publication frequency and citation frequency) diverged until 2021: the publication frequency increased, suggesting that there was a rising interest in CF in that period, and the citation frequency declined, suggesting that the most cited articles are not the most recent publications. Overall, the increased number of publications and citations, over the past few decades, suggests that CF is evolving from a new knowledge frontier into a well-established one and that this is in line with findings by (Amini et al, 2021).…”

“…This study aims to provide the first bibliometric analysis exploring corporate foresight literature. Though, it must be noted that, to our knowledge, there are already two publications that performed bibliometric analyses: on technology foresight (Gibson et al, 2018) and on regional foresight (Amini et al, 2021). However, our research will have a broader perspective.…”

“…There are several softwares or applications to map knowledge domains, such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, BibExcel, etc. We decided to use CiteSpace, not only because of the power analysis but also because it is configured according to each researcher's needs, and, thus this makes it the best tool for working with bibliographic information, including Web of Science and Scopus databases (Zhang et al, 2020;Zhai et al, 2021;Amini et al, 2021)…”

Beyond the COVID-19 crisis: A research note on post-pandemic scenarios for South Tyrol 2030+

“…Contrary to other foresight projects at the regional level (see Amini et al. 2021 ), the vast majority of regional-based actors and stakeholders were included after the scenario building process had been completed.…”

“…It is only recently that, against the backdrop of this rising awareness of the importance of policy and governmental foresight, the regional level has also received increased attention ( Kindras et al., 2019 ; Nagimov et al., 2018 ; Piirainen et al., 2017 ). Regional foresight has been especially useful in fostering discussions on sustainable development paths and anchor regional policymaking in participatory processes ( Amini et al., 2021 ).…”