What weight do our social origins and our encounters carry in the choices we make and that guide our lives? Sébastien Brunet, Director General of the Walloon Institute for Evaluation, Foresight and Statistics (IWEPS), has a fair idea. Of modest background, from the Couvin area in the “boot” of Hainaut—a region “still facing severe socio-economic hardship today”—he was sensitized very early on to “the conditions that produce relations of domination.”
D
eeply attached to the notion of public service and the state university, Brunet studied law and political science at the University of Liège, aiming to understand “the political phenomena that govern living together.” He did not initially intend to become a researcher. But his master’s thesis—on “the University’s role as an instrument in reproducing social inequalities”—caught the attention of Spiral’s founder, Prof. Catherine Zwetkoff, who invited the future political scientist to pursue a PhD. “I don’t think I even knew what a thesis really involved,” he laughs. “Above all I needed to work, and that was motivation enough. I accepted immediately, and that meeting proved decisive for what followed.”
His first work dealt with modern biotechnologies—medical testing, cloning, GMOs—and their interactions with society. “I studied how these new technologies carved out a place in our daily lives, and how public authorities responded,” he recalls. “And I observed that technologies often impose themselves on us without any genuine democratic process.” This opened the way for the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at ULiège, an interdisciplinary field examining the interactions between science, technology, and society.
According to Brunet, these interactions rest on our ability to know and to share knowledge. “If the actors behind a technology do not share what they know, you see what are called ‘capture’ phenomena,” he argues. “They then find themselves in a monopoly position and can capture and steer regulation in ways that suit them. And if the state does not equip itself with sufficient counter-expertise, the public is left at the mercy of these actors’ narratives.”
An example? The “Dieselgate” scandal, which involved, among others, Volkswagen. “It’s clear that carmakers possessed knowledge about diesel engine pollution—knowledge that enabled them to cheat by circumventing regulations,” he notes. “In a democracy, one role of public authorities is therefore to make it possible to assemble scientifically grounded knowledge so that the general interest prevails over particular interests.”
Very quickly, questions of citizen participation were enriched by another notion: risk. “It’s a very important concept, because it allows us to identify what we might disagree on—health, social, or economic risks, for instance—when a technology is introduced into public space,” the political scientist explains. “Beyond biotechnologies, this also concerns all environmental or industrial risks, such as the use of pesticides in agriculture. Risk assessment is an extremely useful instrument for understanding power relations.”
Brunet seized on this issue to expand his own research and that of Spiral, which he headed after Prof. Catherine Zwetkoff retired in 2006. Under his leadership, the lab moved from a thematic approach to risk—focused notably on biotechnologies and nanotechnologies—to a broader, territorial approach with an increasingly practical angle. “Many of our studies were field research, and some were even action research—that is, transforming the reality we were working on. We therefore maintained close ties with actors on those field sites,” he recalls.
The lack of a risk culture proved glaring. “We realized there was both a lack of knowledge and a lack of learning mechanisms in crisis management and risk analysis,” he says. “So, taking advantage of new regulations that required municipalities to have an emergency-planning officer on their territory, we launched the ‘PlaniCom’ certificate in 2008 to train members of civil society—municipal staff, police officers, physicians, firefighters, the military, and private companies—in crisis management and emergency planning.”
Research themes around foresight and anticipation then took hold. “Working on risks ultimately means anticipating harmful events and calculating the likelihood they will occur,” Brunet observes. “But beyond the foreseeable are risks we don’t even know exist! So we naturally asked how to develop tools to anticipate them, using a participatory, interdisciplinary, systemic, and very long-term methodology: foresight.”
For Brunet, this approach is highly pertinent: “Our societies favor short-termism. The tyranny of the present and today’s accelerating technological development are part of a logic that enslaves us. Yet we must also be able to project ourselves collectively into a far longer-term reality, if only to decide what we want for tomorrow and the day after. Unfortunately, projecting ourselves—individually or collectively—20 or 30 years ahead presupposes activating bonds of intergenerational solidarity that are often absent from daily life. And politics, which ought to play that role, struggles mightily to escape the present.”
At the turn of the 2010s, Brunet felt the need to gain experience beyond the University where he had spent most of his career. Foresight then became far more than a research topic for him. In addition to helping create, with UCLouvain, an interuniversity certificate training people in the foresight approach, he left ULiège in 2011 for IWEPS, where he became Director General.
“My role at IWEPS has two heads,” Brunet sums up. “First, statistics. We have the legal mission of producing statistics in Wallonia that are reliable, transparent, and rigorous—whose primary purpose is to enlighten political and democratic debate. That matters because, in this world of post-truth and ‘alternative facts,’ everything becomes an opinion. Without the ability to ground reality in objective evidence, we lose the common foundation on which to agree. And if everything is an opinion, there is no longer any democratic debate possible. My role is to ensure that this work is carried out with full professional independence and in line with international scientific standards. Second, we have a broad decision-support mission, which encompasses both the evaluation of public policies and foresight. We evaluate major Walloon plans—such as the Recovery Plan—and conduct foresight studies to meet the needs of our users (government, parliament, administrations, as well as businesses and civil society).”
“If everything is an opinion, there is no longer any democratic debate possible.”
To that end, Brunet makes a point of ensuring that IWEPS results are widely available to citizens, in the form of statistical briefs, research reports, or more accessible formats such as podcasts and webinars freely available online. “Publishing our work is essential to our mission,” he stresses. “IWEPS is a public scientific institute that serves everyone. The free availability of the knowledge we produce guarantees that we nourish democratic debate and that our work is not instrumentalized based on its results.”
Brunet has always kept strong ties to ULiège. He still teaches several courses there, including some close to his heart, such as “foresight methods.” Theory and practice intertwine: in 2016, he asked his students to develop scenarios about how Belgium’s political system might evolve by 2030. “All those scenarios were placed in a time capsule, sealed in concrete at Sart Tilman for the University’s 200th anniversary,” he smiles. “In 2030, for those who wish, we’ll compare the scenarios with reality. And when I look at the acceleration of tipping phenomena—from Donald Trump’s first election to climate disruption, via the pandemic and biodiversity loss—I find it dizzying to ask where we’ll be, individually and collectively, in 2030.”
It is no doubt this passion for anticipation that led him to take on the role of chair of the scientific council of the new Transitions Laboratory, created in January 2025. For him, this laboratory is part of the initiatives launched by Rector Anne-Sophie Nyssen to “place ULiège on a genuine transitions trajectory and give it the means to match its ambitions.”
Conceived as a center supporting research and teaching, the laboratory is being built on a triple perspective: transdisciplinary, forward-looking, and transformative. “We can’t think about transitions in all their thematic diversity (mobility, energy, food) from a single disciplinary vantage point,” Brunet contends. “We therefore need to multiply approaches and perspectives. And it’s very important that these not be purely scientific, but also include those of civil society, business, and public administration.”
Deeply committed to transdisciplinarity, the political scientist is convinced this last element can have an impact on reality. “Doing transdisciplinarity means being able to listen to what the other brings to the table,” he says. “And field knowledge—from experts by experience—has just as much value as scientific knowledge. The idea, then, is to bring together research teams from very different disciplines with people from business, civil society, or administration, and have them work together so as to achieve a transformative impact on the ground.”
In other words, no funding for new research projects aimed solely at piling up more knowledge about the world to come. “Today, if we have enough information about what lies ahead and about potential solutions to implement, we need to take the next step,” he insists. “We must transform reality, remake institutions and territories, and influence the actors of transition. And if I accepted the chair of the laboratory’s scientific council, it’s with the aim of injecting a methodological foresight dimension. We must integrate the long-term perspective into our thinking and action.”
The first “transitions” call selected three research projects addressing, respectively: the management of aging reinforced-concrete infrastructure (“Concrete transitions: Material transitions: rethinking aging infrastructures in the face of the deterioration of reinforced concrete,” submitted by Associate Prof. Pierre Delvenne); the digital realm and its impacts on social vulnerabilities (“Information Technology in Healthy Ageing,” by Prof. Félix Scholtes); and the development of sustainable territorial management practices (“Échos-Semois: Toward a civic, transdisciplinary, forward-looking eco-observatory to conceive and support the co-evolutions of living beings in the Semois valley,” by Dorothée Denayer, assistant professor).
“A second call for projects will be launched shortly to support other initiatives that let us think today so we don’t have to patch things up tomorrow,” Brunet notes. If the worst is never certain, he, for one, is doing everything he can to avoid it.
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