by James Balzer, Fredy Vargas-Lama, & Aditi Chugh

Introduction — The Temporal Paradox of Policy

Governments face a persistent temporal paradox. Public decisions are usually made within short political, budgetary, and administrative cycles, while many of the problems they seek to address unfold across long-term, systemic, and uncertain horizons. This misalignment produces recurring cycles of political euphoria, implementation, and subsequent frustration, particularly when public problems are framed through inherited assumptions that no longer fit emerging conditions (Cashore et al., 2024; see Figure 1). The result is what this essay calls the linear present: a mode of policymaking in which institutions attempt to govern future challenges through categories, instruments, and evidence derived from the past.

Figure 1. The Linear Present as a Closed Loop. Political euphoria, formal commitment, and implementation each reproduce categories inherited from the past, so frustration resets the cycle rather than revising the temporal standpoint from which policy was designed.

This temporal bias matters because policy failure stems from more than weak implementation or insufficient technical capacity. It reflects how institutions perceive time. When governments project forward from present constraints without interrogating the futures embedded in their assumptions, they risk reproducing what Inayatullah (2008) describes as the “used future”: inherited images of possibility that narrow collective imagination and make alternative trajectories harder to see. Anticipation operates beyond forecasting by examining how present action is shaped by particular images of the future.

This essay argues that public institutions need to strengthen their capacity to act from plausible future conditions, instead of relying solely on desirable future outcomes. Drawing on anticipatory systems theory, futures literacy, critical futures studies, and public policy scholarship, it develops a conceptual and normative argument about the temporal conditions of public reasoning (Poli, 2010; Miller, 2011, 2018; Inayatullah, 2008; Guston, 2014). Its central proposition is that acting from the future makes explicit the temporal standpoint through which scenario planning, backcasting, and anticipatory governance reshape institutional judgement—a standpoint these practices often leave implicit.

The essay proceeds as follows. Section 2 examines the limits of linear policymaking. Section 3 defines acting from the future as a conceptual reframing of policy temporality. Sections 4 and 5 discuss its implications for foresight-to-policy frameworks and anticipatory reasoning. Section 6 considers comparative learning, power, and the Global South. The conclusion reflects on the implications for futures practice and public decision-making.

The Limits of Linear Policymaking

Classical policy analysis has often been organised around a sequential logic: define the problem, identify alternatives, compare options, select an intervention, and implement it through institutional procedures. This tradition remains valuable because it gives decision-making structure, discipline, and analytical transparency. Lasswell’s policy sciences helped establish policy analysis as a field concerned with the systematic connection between knowledge and public action (Lasswell, 1951), while Bardach’s eightfold path translated this concern into a practical sequence for problem-solving and policy design (Bardach, 2012). Yet the same sequential discipline becomes limiting when public problems are uncertain, contested, and shaped by long-term systemic change.

The first limitation is temporal. Linear policy analysis tends to begin from problems as they are currently recognised by institutions. This makes it difficult to address issues whose causes, consequences, or political salience unfold over longer horizons. When policy reasoning starts from present constraints and moves forward incrementally, it risks treating the future as an extension of existing trajectories rather than as a field of discontinuity, emergence, and contestation. Keeney’s (1996) critique of alternative-focused decision-making is relevant here: decision processes often compare available options without first asking whether the right objectives, values, and possibilities have been articulated.

The second limitation is political. Public problems are not neutral technical objects; they are constructed through narratives, interests, institutional routines, and distributions of power. Stone (2012) shows that policy analysis often presents itself as rational problem-solving while obscuring the symbolic, distributive, and value-laden dimensions of public decisions. This matters for futures work because the way a problem is framed already contains assumptions about which futures are desirable, probable, or worth preventing.

The third limitation is institutional. Foresight has frequently been used as an input to planning, producing scenarios, reports, or strategic recommendations that remain external to decision routines. Its value increases when embedded in governance processes, organisational learning, and policy experimentation (Georghiou, 2008; Miles et al., 2016; van der Steen et al., 2015; Guston, 2014). The challenge is to reconsider the temporal standpoint from which public problems, capacities, and choices are judged, rather than simply adding futures methods to linear policy analysis. The next section takes up this reconsideration.

Acting from the Future as Conceptual Reframing

The argument advanced here is best read as a conceptual reframing of policy temporality. Its ambition is modest in method and significant in standpoint: it makes explicit the temporal position already implicit in anticipatory practice and draws out its normative implications for institutional reasoning. Public policy is conventionally organised around the identification of public problems, the assessment of alternatives, and the selection of feasible interventions (Lasswell, 1951; Bardach, 2012). This orientation is necessary, but it can reproduce a temporal bias: problems are often defined through inherited categories, institutional routines, and evidence derived from past trajectories. Inayatullah’s (2008) notion of the used future names the diagnostic that reframing responds to: societies may mistake inherited images of possibility for genuine alternatives.

Acting from the future addresses this tension by shifting the standpoint from which policy reasoning is conducted: plausible future conditions become reference points for evaluating institutional choices, rather than external objects explored before returning to present-day constraints. This reframing does not displace scenario planning, backcasting, futures literacy, or anticipatory governance. It draws from these traditions while foregrounding the temporal standpoint of decision-making. What it adds is a named and consistent first-person position of institutional deliberation—one situated imaginatively within plausible futures—making explicit a standpoint these methods often deploy without fully theorising. Poli’s (2010, 2017) work on anticipatory systems shows how images of the future shape present action, while Miller’s (2011, 2018) account of futures literacy stresses that futures are capacities for rethinking action, not objects waiting to be predicted.

the temporal logic through which such reflexivity enters policy reasoning (Guston, 2014; OECD, 2020).positioning itself as a contribution to theory rather than an empirical comparison of anticipatory institutions or a methodological protocol for policy design. Its core proposition is that anticipation becomes politically significant when it affects institutional judgement: which capacities are developed, which assumptions are questioned, which voices enter the policy imagination, how authority legitimises certain trajectories, and which futures become difficult to justify. The argument aligns closely with anticipatory governance, especially its concern with embedding future-oriented reflexivity in institutions, while foregrounding the temporal logic through which such reflexivity enters policy reasoning (Guston, 2014; OECD, 2020).

Framed in this way, acting from the future asks governments not only to imagine alternatives, but to test present decisions against the demands, risks, and ethical claims of plausible futures.

From Foresight to Policy: An Intertemporal Framework

The relationship between anticipation and decision-making can be understood as a temporal bridge through which imagined futures reshape present institutional choices. This section develops that bridge as an intertemporal framework—formalising the argument presented in Balzer and Vargas-Lama (2025)—and specifies its analytical contribution: shifting the temporal standpoint from which policy judgement is exercised.

The framework draws on scenario planning, backcasting, futures literacy, and anticipatory governance. Scenario planning contributes the plurality of futures against which decisions can be stress-tested; backcasting supplies the normative anchor of a preferred long-term trajectory—acknowledging that participatory and transformative approaches can be iterative, contested, and revisable; futures literacy provides the epistemic disposition to engage futures as open rather than predetermined; and anticipatory governance establishes the institutional embedding through which these capacities become durable governance practice (Guston, 2014; Miller, 2018; OECD, 2020). The framework integrates these contributions while foregrounding what they often leave implicit: the temporal position from which institutional judgement is exercised. This orientation also addresses the used future named earlier—the risk that institutions mistake continuity for foresight when they reason only from present constraints.

The framework’s central operation is to shift the temporal point of reference from which policies are designed. An intertemporal approach starts from plausible future demands and works backward to assess the adequacy of existing institutions, dominant policy narratives, and available intervention logics. In this sense, foresight enables policymaking from the future: it reshapes the standpoint through which institutional choices are made. This reorientation is organised around three interrelated phases—Diagnose, Identify, and Develop.

The Diagnose phase examines the internal and external long-term operating environment that enables or constrains a policy agenda. Through horizon scanning and stakeholder-power mapping, underappreciated issues can be surfaced and the power dynamics defining the policy landscape made explicit (Cairns & Wright, 2018). The analytical output is a structured map of the assumptions, actors, and power relations shaping possible, plausible, and preferable futures (Hancock & Bezold, 1994; Voros, 2003). This analysis examines how power and history condition which futures become thinkable, extending beyond a simple catalogue of present-day trends.

The Identify phase examines why barriers to a policy agenda persist over time. The Futures Triangle and Causal Layered Analysis help contextualise the tension between an issue’s past, present, and imagined futures (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008, 2023). This reveals how institutional inertia, narrative lock-in, or vested interests may foreclose certain trajectories (Goldstein et al., 2023). It also clarifies which past and present drivers must be addressed when developing a long-term preferred future (Milojević, 2005, 2023).

The Develop phase constructs a policy mix that responds to the constraints identified earlier, advances policy goals, and minimises unintended consequences. The Three Horizons framework is useful here because it links the decline of dominant systems, the emergence of transitional innovations, and the formation of preferred long-term patterns (Curry & Hodgson, 2008; Sharpe et al., 2016). In policy terms, this means designing portfolios of interventions that remain defensible across multiple plausible futures, including those beyond the most expected trajectory. A coastal infrastructure investment, for example, must hold up against climate, demographic, and technological scenarios that could shift the conditions of adequacy over the relevant policy horizon. This pathway logic—situating the Diagnose–Identify–Develop framework within a matrix of rising uncertainty and institutional agency—is represented in Figure 2, which extends Sharpe et al.’s (2016) typology.

Figure 2. Locating the Diagnose–Identify–Develop Framework Within the Uncertainty–Agency Matrix. Extending Sharpe et al. (2016), the figure situates the Diagnose–Identify–Develop sequence directly within the matrix, showing how policy pathways displace forecasts and roadmaps as uncertainty and institutional agency rise together.

The framework integrates foresight into policy analysis while preserving analytical discipline. It addresses reactive problem framing, present bias, and limited capacity to deal with uncertainty alongside the structured problem-solving logic of policy analysis (Bardach, 2012). Its transformative potential lies in developing temporal intelligence as an institutional capability—the capacity to perceive, interpret, and act from plural futures while remaining attentive to agency, power, and uncertainty (Inayatullah & Sweeney, 2021; Miller, 2018). Developing this capability requires sustained investment in interpretive infrastructure: dedicated futures teams, deliberative processes, and institutional memory systems, alongside methodological training. Section 5 develops the internal logic of anticipatory reasoning that underpins this capability.

Thinking from Future Conditions

The framework described in Section 4 rests on three principles that explain how anticipatory reasoning works in policy practice: future conditionality, temporal transposition, and intertemporal ethics. These principles are distinct but mutually reinforcing. Future conditionality establishes the evaluative criterion: decisions are stress-tested against multiple plausible futures. Temporal transposition provides the cognitive mechanism: institutions shift their standpoint into those futures and reason from within them. Intertemporal ethics supplies the normative criterion: trajectories are assessed as acceptable, legitimate, and just across time. Together, they define a cognitive and institutional reorientation through which present decisions are evaluated by reference to plausible future conditions (Miller, 2011, 2018; Guston, 2014).

From the perspective of anticipatory systems theory, anticipation operates as a feed-forward capacity: images of the future influence present choices and reshape how institutions process complexity, uncertainty, and time (Poli, 2010, 2017). Thinking from future conditions can therefore be understood as an intertemporal anticipatory loop—cyclical and iterative—as represented in Figure 3. In this loop, imagined futures inform present decisions through future conditionality; temporal transposition shifts the standpoint of judgement into those futures; and intertemporal ethics guides the selection and revision of acceptable trajectories. Beyond its conceptual architecture, the loop also matters politically: it affects not only which futures institutions imagine, but also how they allocate authority, design mandates, and decide which trajectories warrant public commitment.

Figure 3. The Intertemporal Anticipatory Loop. The figure shows how present decisions are reoriented through three mutually reinforcing dimensions: future conditionality, temporal transposition, and intertemporal ethics. Source: Authors’ own elaboration.

Future conditionality is the evaluative dimension of anticipatory reasoning. It requires public decisions to be assessed across multiple plausible future conditions, extending beyond present assumptions. This shifts institutional judgement from optimisation against a single expected future toward anticipatory robustness: asking which decisions remain defensible under conditions that may be uncertain, disruptive, or politically contested (Dator, 1979; Voros, 2003). Within Miller’s (2018) account of futures literacy, this principle redirects policy from predictive control toward structured reflection and experimentation (OECD, 2020). In practice, an infrastructure investment should be assessed against projected demand as well as climate, demographic, fiscal, and technological scenarios that could alter its adequacy within a policy generation.

Temporal transposition is the perspectival dimension. It is the capacity to situate decision-making imaginatively within plausible future conditions and deliberate as if those conditions already formed the context of action (Miller et al., 2018). Temporal transposition is disciplined cognitive reorientation: it changes which questions appear urgent and which present assumptions become contingent. Institutionally, it requires asking which futures are envisaged and which temporal assumptions legitimate current mandates, regulatory frameworks, and planning horizons. A ministry conducting a futures pre-mortem from 2040, for example, asks what would have had to be true in 2025 for an intervention to fail, using that standpoint to expose present blind spots. This aligns with Miller’s (2011) second-order anticipation: examining how expectations, narratives, and routines shape which futures become thinkable.

Intertemporal ethics is the normative dimension. Acting from the future entails responsibilities toward generations and realities that do not yet exist but will be shaped by present choices. Futures literacy thus carries ethical weight: it connects anticipatory reasoning to justice across time (Miller & Poli, 2021). Crucially, intertemporal ethics requires ethical revisability: a preferred future is a provisional orientation, always open to revision as contingencies shift, social learning accumulates, and new actors, values, and conditions reshape what appears plausible, desirable, or legitimate (Hancock & Bezold, 1994; Voros, 2003). This distinguishes the framework from destination-oriented backcasting: anticipatory commitments should be legible, contestable, and revisable through sunset clauses, anticipatory impact assessments, or futures-oriented auditing, in line with agile governance under uncertainty (Spitz & Zuin, 2022).

Taken together, these principles cultivate anticipatory capacity by altering institutional judgement itself: the criteria, assumptions, and authority structures through which decisions are made, legitimised, and reviewed (Inayatullah & Sweeney, 2021). This reading aligns with the OECD’s (2020) work on anticipatory governance and with CEPAL’s guidance for emerging and middle-income countries (Vargas Lama, Rosado, & Oddone, 2025). New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework illustrates this logic. It evaluates policy across long-term wellbeing trajectories, encourages policymakers to reason from the future standpoint of people not yet born, and allows indicators to evolve as values and conditions change (New Zealand Treasury, 2021). It shows how future conditionality, temporal transposition, and intertemporal ethics can become institutional practice.

Comparative Learning, Power and Latin America

Comparative learning from the Global South demonstrates how anticipatory governance is shaped by power, legitimacy, and uneven state capacities, going beyond the adoption of foresight tools under conditions of institutional scarcity. In these contexts, acting from the future is equally a political practice through which public authority allocates attention, legitimises priorities, and makes some trajectories more actionable than others. These cases are offered as analytical illustrations rather than systematic comparisons; a fuller comparative treatment lies beyond the scope of this essay. They complement applied work already under way in this space: Balzer’s (2026) Horizon Summit framework operationalises anticipatory governance as an actionable diagnostic-to-pathway sequence, while the argument developed here asks a prior conceptual question—the temporal standpoint from which that diagnostic work is itself conducted.

Peru offers an instructive case of gradual institutionalisation facing new political conditions. Over the last fifteen years, CEPLAN has sought to consolidate strategic planning as a state capability, linking national visioning, territorial planning, and long-term development agendas. The approval of the Visión del Perú al 2050 by consensus in the Acuerdo Nacional in 2019, followed by the Plan Estratégico de Desarrollo Nacional al 2050, shows an effort to provide continuity beyond electoral cycles and embed long-term reasoning within the planning system (CEPLAN, 2019, 2022). Keiko Fujimori took office on July 28, 2026, leading an administration organized around fiscal retrenchment and administrative downsizing (Diario Gestión, 2026). It remains to be seen whether an administration built on reducing the state apparatus will treat CEPLAN’s anticipatory architecture as institutional memory worth preserving or as bureaucratic weight to be trimmed. The same question applies to any government: acting from the future is tested not by the plans a government inherits, but by whether it continues to reason from them once in office.

Chile represents a different configuration, and a comparable test now in progress. Congreso Futuro, created in 2011, positioned science, public debate, and future-oriented reflection within the legislative sphere, while the Laboratorio de Gobierno promoted innovation capacities inside the executive from 2015 onward (Congreso Futuro, n.d.; Laboratorio de Gobierno, n.d.). This hybrid ecology suggested that anticipatory governance could emerge from interactions among science, parliament, executive innovation, and public deliberation, rather than from a single planning authority. Since March 2026, that institutional ecology has operated under a markedly different executive. José Antonio Kast’s government has assembled a cabinet dominated by independent and technocratic figures, many with private-sector backgrounds across economic, defence, and science and technology portfolios (Instituto de Relaciones Internacionales, 2026). Whether this configuration deepens anticipatory capacity through disciplined, technically literate governance or narrows it by substituting deliberative foresight with managerial efficiency cannot yet be answered—and should not be answered by assumption. The same uncertainty would have applied to the coalition it replaced: institutional capacity for anticipation is not a property of any single political orientation, but a question every government poses anew.

Colombia, by contrast, shows the fragility of long-term futures work when political ambition is not matched by durable institutional architecture. Recent governments have promoted future-oriented initiatives, including E2050, Visión Colombia 2050, and prospective functions within the National Planning Department (Gobierno de Colombia, 2021; DNP, 2022; DNP, n.d.). Yet these efforts have not consolidated a stable, cross-governmental system for long-term anticipation. This pattern is consistent with broader evidence on the institutionalisation of foresight in the region: fragmentation between planning and budgeting, political rotation, weak legal frameworks, and the absence of an evaluation culture recur across Latin American cases as an interlocking ecosystem of discontinuity, not as isolated national failures (Vargas-Lama, 2026). Colombia therefore illustrates a central risk: futures may enter public discourse without becoming institutional memory.

These cases also invite a question this essay cannot fully resolve: whose temporal frameworks count in public foresight? While dominant policy frameworks often privilege linear models of planning and progress, diverse indigenous and local traditions embody rich cyclical, relational, or multi-generational temporalities that can fundamentally reshape what plausible futures look like (Dator, 1979; Guston, 2014). Avoiding epistemological oversimplification is essential to ensuring that plural ways of knowing and experiencing time inform anticipatory governance in nuanced ways (Milojević, 2005). Engaging these epistemologies is a condition for anticipatory reasoning that genuinely reflects the societies it claims to govern.

These cases show that acting from the future depends on who defines plausible futures, how institutions sustain them over time, and whether anticipatory reasoning remains open to democratic contestation — conditions that methods alone cannot supply.

Conclusion — Acting from the Future

Rethinking policy time is ultimately a political act. Governments that act from the future shift the ground on which problems are named, voices are included, and authority is exercised—this is a change in standpoint, not simply a better technique. That shift is never final. It demands continuous democratic contestation over which futures are deemed plausible, whose anticipatory capacities count, and which present commitments can be legitimately constrained by imagined conditions. The futurist’s role, in this light, is to sustain that contestation, keeping institutions epistemically open when political incentives drive premature closure. If anticipation is to become more than a governance fashion, it must harden into an institutional disposition—one for which democratic accountability across time is the primary condition of legitimacy.

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