Foresight on spatial mobility during green and digital transitions: insights from five European regions

The paper advances an anticipatory approach to European regional policy by integrating foresight analysis within the framework of the green and digital transitions, focusing on the changing nature of spatial mobility and its impact on demographics. Building on the MOBI-TWIN project, it develops a foresight scenario archetype framework, structured around two empirically derived axes of regional transformation, adaptiveness and momentum, drawn from quantitative analysis of regional attractiveness and mobility flows, and applies it through a harmonized methodology across five heterogeneous pilot regions to explore how digitalisation and green transitions interact with mobility dynamics. The resulting scenarios, elaborated and regionally articulated through participatory co-creation workshops and validated through an expert survey and local stakeholder workshops, capture distinct combinations of transition capacity, governance quality and resilience. The findings reveal that most regions are expected to remain in low-pace trajectories of incremental adaptation, constrained by institutional inertia, demographic decline and fragmented policy coordination. However, innovation niches and anticipatory governance practices in some of the pilot regions illustrate how peripherality can evolve into renewal through coordinated foresight and stakeholder collaboration. The comparative analysis identifies three broader adaptation pathways: innovation-driven renewal, institutional inertia and structural vulnerability, each requiring a differentiated policy mix.