Regional Energy Strategy as a Guideline for Novel Regulation Process

There are two main ideas in this paper: (a) regional-sector strategy could be created by a ‘bottom-up’ planning process and (b) the foresight methodology (and especially the mix of its methods) are the support tools for the regulation process on the regional level. We base our work on previous experiences and on the results of the research project named ‘Energy Development Strategy for Lower Silesia by Using Foresight Methods’ and carried out by our team from Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland). First of all, we present the idea of regulation in economies and the ‘bottom-up’ approach in programming regional development in the energy sector. The next part of the article concerns the key issues of foresight methodology and the range of its use. The results of our project are presented in the last part of this paper. The main idea is to show how foresight methods and main experts’ methods, e.g. the Delphi method, can successfully support a ‘bottom up’ approach.