Democratising utopian thought in participatory agenda setting

Abstract Engaging non-experts in matters of science and technology has been increasingly stressed both rhetoric action during the past decades. Under call for moving participation upstream, agenda setting processes have identified as viable entry point laypeople’s experiential value-based knowledge into science, innovation governance (STI). Harnessing visioning target promises to elicit such knowledge, whilst at same time evading dilemma informing participants about STI that does not exist prior engagement. To test claims, we investigate a large-scale citizen-visioning exercise employed an initiation transdisciplinary research process, namely CIMULACT. In comparable Europe-wide more than 1000 laypeople (citizens) produced 179 visions desirable futures which built basis co-creating future topics advising EU programme Horizon 2020. We provide depth insights methodology inclusion citizens setting, discuss room methodological improvement regarding potential loss gains creativity diversity opinions considering empirical results ex-post participant evaluation questionnaires (n ≈ 964). The discussed data shows generally positive process engagement, since are retrospective content with visions, they would participate again similar event, favour continue hosting events future. However, were rather sceptic whether actually (can/will) impact on stated aim integration setting.