Abstract
The practice of Hungarian rural development planning shows the lack of future orientation. The time horizon of planning is short-term, the strategic way of thinking beyond 7–10 years long period is missing or it has great deficiencies. It is not even considering the long-term opportunities. Therefore, the short term plans are not derived from established perspectives, they do not have sufficient grounds. This paper briefly summarises the achievements of a research activity to make an attempt to prove that despite the limitations in understanding and unfolding the future, it is possible to provide useful information for the planning of rural development in 20 – 30 years or even on several more years. This is based on pre-scenarios, highlighting the high efficiency and unexpected weak signals of the driving forces.