Foresight and anticipatory governance in public health law

Abstract

Public health law is largely designed to respond to known threats and developments. But the most significant challenges ahead — demographic shifts, rising non-communicable diseases, environmental pressures, and emerging cross-border health threats — require legal frameworks that can anticipate, not merely react. This presentation explores how strategic foresight can strengthen anticipatory governance in public health law. Drawing on the Dutch Public Health Foresight Study, one of Europe’s longest-running institutionalised health foresight exercises, Henk Hilderink shows how future-oriented evidence, long-term trend analysis, and scenario-based reasoning can inform the design of more resilient and adaptive legal frameworks. The presentation argues that integrating foresight into public health governance is not a methodological luxury but a practical necessity: it enables earlier policy intervention, improves preparedness under uncertainty, and creates the strategic space needed for prevention to work before legislation is forced into crisis mode. The session concludes with reflections on what anticipatory governance asks of legal and policy systems and how strategic foresight can help close the gap between where regulation is today and where it needs to be tomorrow.