By Jose Ramos, Ida Uusikyla and Nguyen Tuan Luong
The Corona-virus pandemic has highlighted how a weak signal (the evolution of corona-viruses) can generate a wildcard event, massive disruption with huge implications. It also highlights the value of social foresight, long term thinking geared toward the public good. Unfortunately, as we are seeing with the pandemic, it is a little too late. Under-investment by governments in identifying, understanding and mitigating emerging risks has meant that most countries were not prepared. We are now experiencing the deadly consequences.
But pandemics are only one of a number of issues that as societies we need to apply foresight to. Over the past several decades we have seen an increased complexity of change: in speed, interconnectedness, and uncertainty. This new socio-ecological context brings with it new strategic risks and “wicked” systemic challenges — challenges that are like “knots” and difficult to address. These can include disruptive emerging issues such as climate change, automation, artificial intelligence, emerging diseases, social pathologies and a range of new disruptive technologies. The government has traditionally been good at dealing with social issues and problems which are static and in “silos”. But the type of change we see today is overwhelming traditional planning approaches.
Many of these changes can also be seen as opportunities if we are able to identify them early and find ways of anticipating and acting on them — indeed use them to our advantage. But without anticipation and action, small problems lead to big wicked messes. New approaches to governance are needed which can help institutions express what the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has termed “Triple-A” governance: Anticipatory, Agile and Adaptive[1]
The UNDP is leading an effort to reimagine governance in this context. To better address and respond to such challenges and help countries find faster, more durable solutions to achieve their Sustainable Development Goals, the UNDP established 60 Accelerator Labs around the world. The Accelerator Labs are a new initiative from the UNDP, which aim to drive experimentation and learning to tackle entrenched development problems. In their words: “the initiative [is]about making space for creativity in the face of problems that need new methods & new energy.”[2]
“Anticipatory Governance and Experimentation” form a core capability needed in this context. The UNDP #NextGenGov initiative, which was introduced at the Istanbul Innovation Days 2018, aims to bring together partners to create the space for a new range of deliberate experiments and learning trajectories to accelerate the next generation of governance mechanisms.
Anticipatory Governance
Anticipatory Governance denotes collaborative and participatory processes and systems for exploring, envisioning, direction setting, developing strategy and experimentation for a region. Anticipatory Governance allows a region, whether city or state, to harness the collective intelligence and wisdom of collaborating organizations and citizens, to deal with strategic risks and leverage emerging opportunities for meeting development goals. It is an approach for “social navigation” — the ability of a society to navigate the complex terrain of social change.
Throughout history and even pre-history, we have seen the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures. The Mon of Southeast Asia, The Hohokam of Arizona, the Maya of Central America, and Easter Island — changed, declined or vanished. Others: Chinese, Indic, European, Bantu, and many that have become the nations of today, have changed and evolved to the present. At the most fundamental level, Anticipatory Governance is about our capacity to adapt to change, preserve what is most dear, and thrive and prosper into the future.
To do this a number of new capabilities are required.
- First, the ability to identify the landscape of change (foresight) and use this in organisationally useful ways;
- Secondly, systemic thinking and inter-organizational cooperation are needed so that the whole ecosystem can be mobilized to address wicked and complex interdependencies in the development challenges faced;
- Thirdly, a cultural and institutional shift that supports experimentation which can be scaled for impact and which can use experiments to drive learning.
Anticipatory Governance has different outcomes and value propositions attached to them. This table provides an overview:
| Value Proposition / Outcome | Summary |
| Identify weak signals and disruptors before they become problems / reduce surprise | Seeing the horizons |
| Cross-departmental / agency learning and collaboration | Left and right-hand talking |
| Avenues for citizen engagement in exploring and shaping the future | Partnership with people |
| Develop innovations that have a “strategic fit” with a changing and future environment | Future relevant innovation |
| Prioritize investment areas in research, education, industry development, markets, science, and tech changes | Strategic investments |
| Build systemic understandings around wicked problems that lead to more nuance “pressure point” interventions | Know the acupuncture points |
| Capacity to adapt quickly to changing conditions, by using experiments that can scale for impact | Adapt to change |
| Mobilize an ecosystem to tackle systemic level challenges | Collaborative Action |
| Bringing together resources that enhance all when shared | Mutualizing commons |
There are different types of Anticipatory Governance, some of which are more recent and others that go back to the 1960s. As well, Anticipatory Governance approaches have been applied in different ways across a variety of contexts:
- In Finland to support ministerial and parliamentary knowledge and decision making as well as a trade mission
- In Singapore to support all-of-government future readiness for early identification of strategic risks
- In northern Europe to mobilize action to address sustainable development challenges
- In South Korea to understand citizens changing images of a preferred future and align priorities, drawing on work by the National Assembly Futures Institute (NAFI)
- In the USA dozens of states have applied participatory futures as part of anticipatory democracy processes
- In New Zealand to help rebuild the city of Christchurch after devastating earthquakes using participatory futures
- In Australia to do horizon scanning across partners organizations
- In the UK foresight has been embedded across a number of governmental systems
These are just some of the many examples.
Three Resources for Anticipatory Governance
Looking forward, who wants to have to go through another pandemic like the one we are experiencing now? Loss of loved ones and broken hearts, shattered businesses and lost jobs, days and days of quarantine, an economic mess, worry about the futures. The cost of short-termism is great. Yet there are other strategic risks and weak signals that can create equal or even greater pain, and so it is incumbent on our societies to invest in an Anticipatory Governance for Experimentation approach that can effectively deal with the volatile nature of our world.
Three resources for Anticipatory Governance are key: institutional futures, participatory futures, and adaptive organizational capacity.
Resource 1 — Inter-organizational Futures
Much institutional knowledge already exists in various organizations in government and in NGOs / CSOs. Many organizations already do and have research and knowledge about the future for specific areas. However, it is too common for these organizations to NOT share what they know about the future with each other. So one of the first “low hanging fruit” to pick is to bring organizations together that have a stake in an issue, and which have some tacit or explicit knowledge of the futures of that issues. Creating an inter-organizational system for sharing knowledge on a topic of shared concern leverages existing strengths and can produce quick wins. This can be done with a variety of strategies: web platforms, workshops, webinars, etc. This cooperation can then be scaled up to other aspects: shared analysis shared communication/media / public engagement, and shared experimentation.
Resource 2 — Participatory Futures
Citizens hold a wide variety of knowledge and some are “future-sensing” types while others are “future-making” types. Tapping into citizen knowledge can create the requisite awareness of change that provides agility and new pathways for regional policy, strategy and change efforts.
One potential pitfall in envisioning the future of a region is when a future vision or direction is framed by narrow interests or what Sohail Inayatullah calls ‘used futures’ — images created somewhere else but superimposed uncritically or serving special or hidden economic interests (Inayatullah 2008). Getting past the “used future” and having an authentic goal or vision that is particular to a region’s needs and aspirations is essential. We need to include all the people in a region that have a stake in that future — not just a future framed based on narrow commercial interest, a policy clique or lobby group.
Participatory futures leverage citizens’ strengths and collective intelligence and can help with mapping horizons (identifying weak signals), creating vision and purpose, charting strategic pathways, testing ideas and mobilizing change. This report by Nesta provides a useful overview.
Resource 3 — Organizational Capacity to Adapt
The organizational capacity to adapt is also needed. We need to create a bridge between anticipation and experimentation. This is a big challenge, especially in government where experiments can be seen as unacceptable risks. Even with government support and well resourced CityLabs, working across the messy spaces of society to generate change is challenging. There are a whole number of good strategies and frameworks for doing this, and people should just do what works. One framework that may be useful is the Anticipatory Experimentation Method (Ramos 2017).
Practically the method entails five stages:
- Challenging the used future (questioning outdated assumptions and images of the futures)
- Developing a preferred future or a new set of assumptions
- Ideating a number of prototype ideas from the vision or new assumptions
- Choosing which ideas to experiment with and running real-world experiments (e.g. action research / co-design)
- Scaling and investing in the experiments with the best promise
Whatever approach we use, the main takeaway that we’d like to offer is that societal navigation and adaptive capacity are possible and desirable. Yes, for the most part, we have collectively “dropped the ball” with the coronavirus, and now it will be painful, we will need to clean up the mess and pick up the pieces. But we can be ready for the next “surprise”. This experience can be our inoculation for the challenges the future will invariably bring.
As seen from many examples around the world we can and we are building Anticipatory, Agile, and Adaptive (Triple-A) governance. Given the variety of emerging challenges we collectively face, how we each do this for ourselves, in our own regional contexts, and together, is the next big question.
[1] This triple A governance concept was developed by the UNDP team in Vietnam in 2019 and applied in work programs in 2020.
[2] For more information on UNDP accelerator labs see here: https://acceleratorlabs.undp.org/blog1.html
About the Authors
Dr. José Ramos is Senior Consulting Editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, Director of Action Foresight, Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Sunshine Coast, and Partner with Ethical Fields.
Nguyen Tuan Luong is the Head of Solutions Mapping at UNDP Accelerator Lab Vietnam, where he brings his whole heart, hands, and head to be in service to the great ambition of reimagining how development work is done.
Ida Uusikyla is a cross-unit innovator in many projects at UNDP Viet Nam focusing on inclusive and governance innovation. Ida has experience in e-governance, emerging technologies, institutional reforms, complexity science and innovation policy.
References
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight.
Ramos, J. (2014). Anticipatory governance: Traditions and trajectories for strategic design. Journal of Futures Studies, 19(1), 35-52.
Ramos, J. (2017). Futureslab: Anticipatory experimentation, social emergence, and evolutionary change. Journal of Futures Studies, 22(2), 107-118.
Ramos, J., Sweeney, J. A., Peach, K., & Smith, L. (2019). Our futures: by the people, for the people. Nesta. https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Our_futures_by_the_people_for_the_people_WEB_v5.pdf
