25 Years Anniversary Event Workshop Summaries
Designing the future: the Alpine Space programme post 2027
by Helen Lückge (Climonomics), workshop leader
The 25th anniversary event of the Interreg Alpine Space Programme in May offered a wonderful opportunity not only to reflect on the past, but also to open up a creative space for imagining what lies ahead. The workshop session “Designing the future Alpine Space programme” invited participants to take a creative leap into the future and to reflect on the programme’s long-term potential beyond 2027.
The workshop began with a short input to set the tone for creative thinking. Participants were introduced to three key concepts from futures thinking:
- Mental stretching: to loosen habitual thought patterns and open up to new perspectives,
- The importance of a 10-year time horizon: to move beyond linear projections and imagine transformative change,
- And the encouragement to “be ridiculous, at first”: because bold ideas often start with unconventional thinking.
The session then took the group through a three-step process. In addition to the short input, the tuning-in session helped participant to find a good atmosphere for the workshop. Everyone was invited to mentally travel to the year 2035 and create a future news headline, either celebrating the success of a visionary project, or highlighting a major achievement of the Alpine Space Programme. Exchanging these headlines already brought along some first a-ha moments.
The second step focused on a visioning approach. In small groups, participants developed visions for the programme’s future role in addressing key challenges. They used the future news as starting point to explore which challenges need to be tackled in the future, which types of projects are necessary to address them and what role the Alpine Space programme needs to play to address them. These elements were then combined into shared visions or visionary approaches for the programme beyond 2027.
In a third backcasting step, participants discussed what would be needed to make these visions a reality: What kind of support and framework conditions should the programme provide in the future? Which stakeholders need to be involved – and how can they be empowered to contribute?
The group discussions were organised along the current programme priorities but also offered the opportunity to go beyond them – which indeed several breakout groups used to develop more cross-cutting approaches.
The workshop demonstrated the value of creative formats and cross-sectoral dialogue in shaping the future of cooperation in the Alpine region. It also highlighted the importance of moving from knowledge to skills – and from ideas to action.
