Abstract. Foresight has become a widely employed method in the last decades, however only few of the foresight programmes proved to be successful and long lasting. This poses a controversy taking into account that the concept and the methodology of foresight have been exhaustively studied, and the achieved level of information, consultative and organizational support at hand is sufficient to carry out projects of different scale and subject. The author presumes that the reasons lie in the predominant attention of foresight actors to its material outcomes and methodology instead of mechanisms that form the very basis of the system, whose future is subject to analysis by means of foresight. The hypothesis is further justified with analysis of foresight programmes in the Great Britain and Brazil, which enables to propose a revised definition of the foresight concept.