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Paper short abstract

Mission-oriented R&I policy presupposes a shared future. Yet retropolitical movements and AI-driven temporalities erode precisely this ground. Drawing on European foresight work, the paper asks which futures are stabilized or foreclosed as the future itself becomes a site of political contestation.

Paper long abstract

Mission-oriented research and innovation policies, from Horizon Europe missions and Transformative Innovation Policy to the SDGs, rest on a largely unexamined premise: that a shared orientation toward the future exists as common ground for political action and knowledge production. This paper argues that this premise is currently under severe strain. Two interrelated developments are destabilizing the future as collective reference point: the growing global power of retropolitical and retrotopian projects that deliberately displace forward-oriented imaginaries with backward-looking, particularist visions; and AI-driven temporalities that configure agency and novelty as optimization of the past, structured through historical data and algorithmic logics.

Building on critiques of mission-oriented innovation policy, which asked whether the paradigm was already captured by technology-push logics before it could become effective, this paper extends that critique: mission-oriented R&I policy risks not only internal capture by growth-oriented norms, but faces a deeper external legitimacy crisis. European foresight practices increasingly operate in a political environment where the idea of a shared, open future is attacked from multiple directions. The paper examines how these practices respond to or reproduce hegemonic normative frameworks under such conditions: which sociotechnical futures are stabilized and rendered actionable, which alternative directionalities are foreclosed, and whose futures are marginalized as retropolitical movements delegitimize universalist imaginaries.

The paper maps the tension between the proclaimed transformative ambitions of mission-oriented R&I policy and its actual epistemic and political effects under retropolitical pressure and asks whether this condition demands a fundamental reconceptualization of the relationship between research governance, foresight, and political imagination.