June 2026 blog post: entering the final sprint, and then what?

As PREFER enters its final sprint, I find myself returning to a question that is perhaps as much personal as scientific: what does it mean to apply social science? Much of my work over the years has been devoted to understanding how people make sense of situations in which the worlds they know and value are profoundly challenged. PREFER has taken this a step further, by paying particular attention to the principles, values and ethical commitments through which people qualify what is at stake. But understanding these moral grammars is only one part of the story. At some point, the question becomes: what can we do with this knowledge?

PREFER has generated results that, I believe, are particularly well suited to opening this question. Across very different places and situations, our research has shown how apparently similar threats can acquire very different meanings, and how responses to them depend on locally grounded ways of judging what matters, what can be accepted, what must be protected, and what kinds of change remain conceivable. This suggests that there is something potentially useful here not only for academic debate, but also for those who design policies, accompany transitions or intervene in situations where established ways of living are under pressure.

The challenge is to translate these insights without turning them into yet another external framework imposed on the people concerned.

This is where I have started to imagine what a next step might look like. Rather than producing another diagnostic tool, one could envisage a form of social innovation that helps actors work from locally expressed principles, values and ethical concerns when thinking about possible futures and practical interventions. Such an approach would need to remain experimental and situated: starting from narratives and lived experience, making different ways of qualifying a situation visible, and creating spaces in which these qualifications can actually inform collective action. In other words, the ambition would be not simply to transfer PREFER’s results, but to explore whether they can become part of a different way of designing and governing interventions.

For the moment, this remains an idea rather than a project. Before taking it any further, we will discuss it with some of our policy and field-intervention partners and ask a very simple question: does this make sense from where you stand? Their response will be an important test of whether the path opened by PREFER can lead somewhere beyond the project itself.

More later!!!