Article
Fredy Vargas-Lama1*
1Faculty of Management, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
Abstract
This article examines why integrating foresight into government strategy in Latin America remains elusive—not as a set of isolated shortcomings, but as a reinforcing ecosystem of short-termism, institutional fragmentation, cultural resistance, corruption, and weak learning. Drawing on a five-year research project with public officials and comparative international evidence, it shows that most countries in the region are still at an early stage of institutionalisation, with only partial exceptions. The analysis is framed through anticipatory governance: the capacity of states to embed foresight in policymaking while strengthening participation and institutional continuity. Illustrations from Finland, Singapore, and other contexts highlight the value of combining technocratic instruments with deliberative processes. The article concludes that the core challenge is not to replicate external models, but to build hybrid anticipatory practices that acknowledge institutional fragility and enable societies to co-create preferred futures.
Keywords
Foresight; Anticipatory Governance; Latin America; Institutional Fragility
Introduction
The integration of long-term thinking and vision into government action has become a necessity in Latin America. Although the region has developed strategic visions and national development plans over the past few decades, it still faces tensions between technocratic design and institutional realities (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024). Formal structures exist, but the articulation between vision, policies, and budgets remains weak (Boston, 2021).
In contrast to technocratic models that prioritise the creation of specialised agencies and technical reports, Latin American governments have struggled to institutionalise anticipation. Those limitations are expressed in twelve critical dimensions: fragmentation between planning and budgeting, political rotation, lack of technical capacities, weakness of legal frameworks, cultural resistance to anticipation, poor inter-institutional continuity, corruption and conflicts of interest, lack of evaluation culture, low citizen participation, weight of short-term sectoral interests, and the disconnect between levels of government (Vargas-Lama, 2024a; Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024).
These tensions are not unique to Latin America, but they are especially intense. Comparative studies show that, although Europe has consolidated parliaments with future national foresight committees and networks (Habegger, 2021; Pouru-Mikkola et al., 2023), in Latin America, anticipatory exercises remain isolated practices, with no continuity of electoral cycles (OECD, 2023b; Washington, 2023).
The article moves from the identification of the main barriers to the institutionalisation of foresight in Latin America to an institutional roadmap and, finally, to a set of pathways for change that allow exploring how these barriers can be addressed in a differentiated way, combining technical instruments, cultural narratives, and anticipatory capacities, in line with contemporary approaches to strategic foresight and anticipatory governance (Hines & Bishop, 2015; Kuosa, 2016; Slaughter, 2020).
Critical Barriers to Foresight Integration
The integration of foresight into Latin American governance faces obstacles that go beyond the technical. These barriers express structural tensions between an ideal technocratic model—based on stable bureaucracies and solid legal frameworks—and institutional realities characterised by fragility, discontinuity, and low trust (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024).
Based on evidence collected from a five-year research project with public officials in Latin America (Vargas-Lama, 2024a; 2024b), as well as recent comparative analyses (OECD, 2023a; Boston, 2021), this section identifies seven main areas of friction that run through public action: short-termism, lack of technical capacities, institutional fragmentation, bureaucratic inertia, cultural resistance, corruption and the weak institutionalisation of learning.
The purpose is not to list limitations, but to show how these barriers make up an ecosystem of discontinuity and mistrust that hinders the consolidation of an anticipatory culture. Based on these tensions, the analysis advances through empirical examples and comparative references that allow us to evaluate the conditions—and the limits—for institutionalising foresight in contexts of state fragility.
Short Institutional Deadlines and Political Cycles
Institutional short-termism is the most visible barrier to the integration of foresight. Electoral cycles of four or six years in countries such as Colombia and Mexico condition planning horizons, prioritising immediate achievements and political spectacle over a long-term strategic vision (Washington, 2023). Thus, national development plans tend to reflect the presidential agendas of the moment rather than a sustained vision of the State.
In Colombia, the succession of four-year plans has implied abrupt changes in priorities, with little continuity between governments. In Mexico, the National Development Plan 2019–2024 departed from previous foresight exercises oriented to 20-year horizons, without establishing a structural connection with them.
The literature describes this phenomenon as “democratic myopia”: the tendency of political systems to prioritise short-term benefits over intergenerational interests (Boston, 2021). In Latin America, this myopia is accentuated by high levels of inequality and by interest groups demanding immediate responses, reducing the margin for long-term commitments (OECD, 2023b).
The result is an institutional ecosystem in which foresight tends to remain a rhetorical aspiration, weakly anchored in structures capable of sustaining strategic horizons beyond democratic cycles.
Deficit of Technical Capabilities and Critical Mass
A second central barrier is the shortage of technical capacity for foresight and future studies within Latin American governments. Although there are planning institutions, such as CEPLAN in Peru or the Office of Planning and Budget in Uruguay, they lack a sufficient critical mass of experts to consolidate an ecosystem of anticipation.
Most Latin American countries remain in the lower strata of the international typology of long-term thinking, reflecting a barely incipient level of institutionalisation of foresight (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024). In practice, foresight teams are small, with uneven training and little seniority, which exposes them to political rotation and a constant loss of institutional memory.
The consequence is twofold: on the one hand, foresight is perceived as an academic luxury, alien to the urgency of public management (Mauksch et al., 2020); on the other hand, it leads to excessive reliance on external consultancies, which fragment processes and hinder local ownership.
Without a stable community of practice, anticipation can hardly be consolidated as a tool of governance, remaining an episodic exercise and vulnerable to political rotation. Overcoming this structural weakness requires sustained training strategies, learning networks, and institutional cooperation (Hines & Bishop, 2015).
Institutional and Territorial Fragmentation
A third key barrier is the fragmentation of public action, both horizontally (between ministries) and vertically (between levels of government). Although several countries have developed national visions, such as Peru 2050 and Uruguay 2050, the mechanisms for articulating these visions with sectoral and territorial plans are often weak or nonexistent (OECD, 2023a; Naranjo Bautista et al., 2025).
In Peru, CEPLAN has promoted participatory planning methodologies; however, regional and local governments often lack the technical capacity and financial resources to implement them.
In decentralised contexts such as Mexico or Colombia, the lack of intergovernmental coherence prevents national agendas from being translated into coherent territorial policies.
Fragmentation generates duplication of effort and resource waste by encouraging isolated diagnoses and bureaucratic competition in the absence of a common framework for the future. As a result, foresight is confined to institutional islands, with little capacity to guide cross-cutting strategic decisions and coordinate long-term public action.
Bureaucratic Inertia and Rigid Structures
Institutional inertia constitutes a fourth barrier to the integration of foresight. Latin American public administrations are usually organised in rigid hierarchies, with procedures that privilege routine over innovation (Hale, 2024). In this context, foresight appears as a foreign body, making it difficult to integrate into daily management processes.
An official interviewed as part of the research project noted: “There is no room here to think about 2050 when we are solving this week’s problems.” This perception reflects how the pressure to address the urgency systematically displaces any initiative for strategic reflection.
At the organisational level, resistance to change manifests as distrust of participatory methodologies, a preference for short-term quantitative reports, and difficulty incorporating interdisciplinary visions. Rather than facilitating collaboration, ministry structures tend to operate as airtight compartments (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024).
Even when prospective units are created, they are often marginalised within the bureaucracy, in contexts where work incentives privilege immediate and measurable results over strategic innovation (Cairns & Wright, 2018). As a result, bureaucratic inertia consolidates an organisational environment adverse to anticipation and reinforces the primacy of the short term.
Cultural Resistances
Deep-rooted cultural norms are an underlying barrier to the integration of foresight. In many Latin American governments, an institutional culture focused on hierarchical authority and top-down decision-making persists, which hinders horizontal anticipation processes (Smith & Cox-Smith, 2023).
At the political level, leaders tend to distrust foresight, since opening up long-term scenarios implies recognising uncertainties and limits to the control of power.
At the administrative level, the culture of “putting out fires” reinforces the logic of resolving emergencies and systematically postponing strategic discussions. This spirit of immediacy permeates bureaucracies, relegating reflection on the future to the background (Slaughter, 2020).
Social resistance is also linked to low foresight literacy. Citizens who are unfamiliar with the value of long-term thinking rarely pressure governments to adopt these practices (Hines & Bishop, 2015).
Overcoming these resistances requires not only modifying formal procedures but also transforming deeply rooted political and organisational cultures. In the absence of this cultural change, foresight can hardly be integrated as a sustained practice of governance and tends to be relegated to the face of logics of control, urgency and immediacy.
Corruption and Conflicts of Interest
Entrenched rent-seeking dynamics are among the most corrosive barriers to the integration of foresight. When strategic decisions are captured by powerful groups, resources tend to be directed to short-term projects that generate immediate returns for specific actors, rather than to long-term investments with collective benefits (Birhanu et al., 2016).
In these contexts, planning often becomes a ritual alongside informal practices of discretionary budget allocation. Under conditions of low transparency, foresight exercises may be perceived as irrelevant in the face of clientelist arrangements that effectively determine the destination of resources.
Recent studies show that bribery and regulatory capture operate as authentic “business models”, generating short-term benefits but eroding the legitimacy of the State and social trust (Salter, 2012). In this context, anticipation becomes an institutionally fragile practice, dependent on leadership capable of resisting immediate pressures and creating safeguards that protect strategic processes from the capture of interests.
Thus, corruption creates an environment in which long-term planning permanently competes with informal logics of power and political profitability.
Weak institutionalisation of learning and assessment
Another barrier is the absence of systematic organisational learning mechanisms. Although some countries have incorporated ex-post evaluations of policies, these frameworks are relatively recent, and their implementation remains limited (OECD, 2023a).
The lack of long-term monitoring systems means strategic plans do not inform each other. That produces a chronic discontinuity: each government initiates new agendas without leveraging accumulated learning, thereby eroding the credibility of foresight and reinforcing a culture of improvisation (CAF, 2022).
In contrast to contexts with permanent structures of evaluation and periodic review, as in the case of the Finnish Parliament, assessment in Latin America is usually episodic and oriented towards accountability rather than collective learning that enables the adjustment of policies and strategies.
The consequence is a vicious circle: without sustained evaluation, errors are not corrected, foresight loses legitimacy, and the willingness to finance and maintain anticipatory capacities is progressively reduced.
Critical Synthesis: From Barriers to the Ecosystem
The barriers discussed throughout this section do not operate in isolation. Together, they configure an institutional ecosystem that reproduces discontinuity, fragmentation, and distrust in long-term public action, limiting states’ capacity to sustain anticipatory practices beyond episodic or technocratic efforts.
This diagnosis raises central questions for futures studies and public policy: can the region develop anticipatory practices based on its own institutional fragility? Is it possible to transform foresight into a collective capacity and not just a technocratic exercise? What trajectories of change would allow us to move from fragmented practices to more robust and legitimate systems of anticipatory governance?
Improving Citizen Participation
Foresight is not the exclusive domain of government institutions. Civic participation is essential to legitimise and sustain any long-term strategy (Hügel & Davies, 2020). However, in most Latin American countries, societies do not have a culture of anticipation, nor do they demand visions from their governments beyond the short term (Vargas-Lama, 2024b). This absence of social pressure reinforces institutional inertia, leaving foresight as an isolated exercise in public life (Hines & Bishop, 2015).
Various contemporary approaches to foresight emphasise the co-creation of preferred futures as a deliberative process that strengthens democratic legitimacy and the collective capacity for anticipation, especially in contexts of inequality and political distrust (Godet, 1985; Voros, 2003; Lo, 2025). In this sense, foresight is conceived as a shared responsibility between governments and communities, aimed at broadening decision-making horizons beyond the short term.
Participatory scenario planning initiatives, citizen laboratories or the inclusion of anticipation in education are tools that can help to materialise this co-responsibility (Rohrbeck & Kum, 2018; Cuhls et al., 2024). In this way, foresight not only becomes a planning technique but also a collective language for thinking together about the futures we want to inhabit.
International Lessons: Adaptation
The challenges of integrating foresight are not unique to Latin America. Governments across regions face problems such as short-termism, limited technical capacity, and difficulties in institutionalising intertemporal learning processes (Boston, 2021; Washington, 2023). In this context, anticipatory governance emerged as the ability of States to systematically incorporate anticipation into policy design (Önnerfors & Schultz, 2022), articulating social participation, inter-institutional coordination, and continuity over time (OECD, 2020; Fuerth & Faber, 2012; Guston, 2014).
In Finland, the creation of the Committee for the Future in Parliament serves as an institutional reference, establishing a legislative body responsible for reviewing reports on the future and incorporating long-term implications into parliamentary debate (Pouru-Mikkola et al., 2023).
In Singapore, systematic scenario exercises have been key to anticipating global changes and strengthening national resilience, combining strategic planning and adaptive capacity (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024).
In Latin America, replicating models from Finland or Singapore would fail. It is essential to adapt foresight practices to anticipatory governance frameworks that are compatible with local capacities, integrating community knowledge, social innovation, and state structures (OECD, 2021a; ECLAC, 2025).
Rather than importing models, international cooperation and South-South learning enable the exchange of practices, the building of legitimacy, and the support for anticipatory governance processes adapted to fragile institutional contexts (Miller, 2018; OECD, 2020).
Next Steps: Institutionalising Foresight
The institutionalisation of foresight presents a significant challenge for Latin American governments. Moving towards anticipatory governance implies not limiting specific exercises, but integrating anticipation into the State (OECD, 2020; Fuerth & Faber, 2012).
First, grant clear legal mandates for long-term planning. International experience shows that foresight is consolidated when a regulatory framework is in place to protect it from political fluctuations (Kuosa, 2016). Without this shield, future agendas are subordinated to each administration.
Second, the creation of foresight units with direct access to decision-making centres is key, as they articulate collaborative ecosystems that connect the government with social, academic, and productive actors (Hines & Bishop, 2015).
Third, it is essential to invest in the continuous training of public officials and social leaders. The community of practice must transcend changes in governance and be maintained over time (Mauksch et al., 2020). Recent scholars argue that anticipatory capacity development is both political and cultural, rather than just technical (Guston, 2014).
Finally, institutionalising does not mean copying models from the Global North. Latin America faces realities of fragmentation, informality, and low trust in institutions (Vargas-Lama & Melo, 2024). Therefore, the following steps seek to build anticipatory governance from a position of fragility, combining state frameworks with community initiatives and local knowledge. The institutionalisation of foresight depends not only on the design of instruments but also on the transformation of meanings, incentives, and power relations that sustain short-termism, articulating technical and cultural dimensions of change.
Deep Layers of Change: Narratives, CLA, and Institutionalising Foresight
Beyond legal frameworks and bureaucratic reforms, the deeper challenge lies in transforming the cognitive and cultural layers that shape how Latin American governments imagine the future. In many cases, uncertainty is still perceived as a threat rather than an opportunity.
Why is a Deeper Goal Needed?
While Section 4 defined what needed to be done—laws, foresight units, and learning systems—this section examines how and why such measures succeed or fail. The institutionalisation of foresight requires not only technical design, but also a shift in cultural grammar – the deep stories that shape how governments imagine the future.
Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) provides a structured framework for examining how discourses, institutions, and metaphors interact to reproduce or transform power structures, revealing the cultural and cognitive layers that shape decision-making systems (Inayatullah, 1998; Inayatullah et al., 2022; Wahab, 2024). From this perspective, CLA enables addressing the gap between public policy instruments and the collective meanings that guide state action (Inayatullah & Milojević, 2015).
Fundamental Metaphor: Weaving the Future from Fragility
Foresight in Latin America tends to operate as isolated technical islands, even under favourable institutional conditions. To transcend this limitation, a guiding metaphor is proposed: weaving the future from fragility. From this perspective, public institutions are conceived as complex fabrics, constantly under repair, shaped by intertemporal constraints and diverse historical trajectories across the region.
This contrast is observed, for example, between Colombia—where a technocratic tradition has allowed for some institutional continuity since the sixties—and Peru, where recurrent cycles of institutional construction and collapse since the nineties have generated persistent fragility and volatility (Guiot-Isaac, 2022; Karl, 2018; OECD, 2021b).
From this perspective, the institutionalisation of foresight must also be territorial, bridging the historical gap between national and subnational systems. Without strong regional capacities, national strategies remain, as the OECD (2022) observed, as a “forecast without territory”.
The CLA: Four Layers of Transformation
This section applies Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) to show how different layers—from litany and systemic causes to worldviews and deep metaphors—influence the transformative capacity of governance systems.
Table 1: Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) of Barriers to Institutionalising Foresight in Latin America
| CLA Layer | Description |
| Litany | Fragmented plans, unimplemented visions (2040–2050) and repetitive agendas. |
| Systemic causes | Weak links between planning, budgeting and evaluation; high turnover; low institutional density; and politicized interests that limit coordination. |
| Worldviews | Foresight is considered an academic luxury or an alien trend; the short term is equated with control. |
| Deep metaphors | The “tyranny of the present” sustains inertia. The counter-myth, “weaving the future from fragility”, rethinks vulnerability as a source of creativity and collaboration. |
The institutionalisation of foresight therefore implies transforming meanings, incentives and power relations: moving from isolated products to sustained systems; from short-term metrics to forms of intertemporal accountability; and from a technocratic logic to practices of shared foresight. These transformations do not occur homogeneously, but through different trajectories of institutional change.
From CLA to Pathways: four scenarios for change
Building on the previously developed layered analysis, this section explores four pathways of institutional change that describe how governance systems can—or cannot—translate foresight into sustained public action capacities. These paths range from symbolic adjustments to forms of governance that begin to act deliberately from the future.
The typology is inspired by the scenarios of progression of change developed in futures studies, which distinguish between institutional responses of no change, marginal change, adaptive change, and transformative change, and incorporate the analysis of resistances, conflicts, and differentiated rhythms of anticipatory change (Inayatullah, 2020; Milojević, 2023)
- Unchanged (less desirable): Foresight remains an improvised practice, with minimal impact on decision-making and a progressive loss of legitimacy.
- Marginal change: workshops and symbolic exercises of foresight are carried out, but with limited institutional traction and without sustained impact on policies or budgets.
- Adaptive change: national and sectoral foresight units are created with clear mandates and permanent access to the main decision-making spaces (OECD, 2020); training programmes and budget labelling mechanisms begin to consolidate institutional learning.
- Transformative change: anticipation is integrated in a transversal way through multi-horizon legislation, anticipatory audits and participatory vision-building processes; the State begins to govern explicitly from the future.
These four pathways represent observable institutional trajectories that address—or reinforce—the barriers identified in the article. While non-change and marginal change tend to reproduce short-termism, fragmentation, and the weakness of institutional learning, adaptive and transformative pathways make it possible to progressively address gaps in capacity and continuity through legal, budgetary, and participatory instruments that reconfigure governance incentives.
Operational implications
Each of the barriers analysed is linked to a lever-instrument-metric chain that allows the structural diagnoses to be translated into concrete institutional actions. Table 2 summarises these relationships.
Table 2: Operational implications: from barriers to levers of change
| Structural barrier | Change lever | Institutional instruments | Indicators/Metrics |
| Institutional short-termism | Legislative continuity | Multi-horizon legislation; Long-term budget labelling | % of public expenditure with a horizon ≥10 years |
| Skills deficit | Anticipatory critical mass | Training alliances; Co-produced foresight exercises | Number of officials trained; Team continuity |
| Institutional fragmentation | Interinstitutional coherence | Cabinet-level foresight advisory | Alignment rate between strategic decisions and future policies |
| Cultural resistances | Organizational incentives | Career rewards tied to intertemporal goals | % of performance evaluations with long-term criteria |
| Corruption and capture | Anticipatory transparency | Anticipatory audits; Open Data Systems | Budget transparency and traceability indices |
These operational implications reinforce the roadmap presented in Section 4 and show how the different trajectories of change identified can be translated into concrete instruments, anchored in deeper narratives of legitimacy, trust and intertemporal accountability.
Synthesis and contribution
The institutionalisation of foresight should be understood as a layered transformation rather than a linear reform, in which technical instruments only make sense when they are articulated with cultural, narrative, and organisational changes. From this perspective, the metaphor of weaving the future from fragility portrays Latin America not as a deficient case but as a hybrid space where anticipation emerges through tensions, adaptations, and situated learning. By integrating Layered Causal Analysis with change-progression scenarios, the region ceases to be a mere recipient of external models and becomes a laboratory for adaptive and relational foresight (Ramos, 2023).
Conclusions and recommendations
This article shows that the barriers to institutionalising foresight in Latin America are structural, historical, and cultural, but not set in stone. These barriers are embedded in governance routines that privilege immediacy over continuity, performance over learning, and control over participation. Overcoming them requires a double movement: on the one hand, technical and institutional reforms—legal frameworks, foresight units, and long-term budgetary mechanisms—and, on the other, narrative and cultural transformations that reconfigure the meanings that guide public decision-making.
In this sense, the institutionalisation of foresight should be understood not as a linear sequence of reforms but as a layered transformation in which the technical, political, and symbolic dimensions reinforce one another. The metaphor of weaving the future from fragility allows us to interpret the Latin American condition not as a deficit, but as a hybrid configuration in which anticipation emerges through adaptation, collaboration, and situated learning. Unlike imported models based on stability and hierarchy, this approach recognises hybridity and vulnerability as strategic assets to build continuity in contexts of uncertainty.
Likewise, anticipatory governance cannot be limited to the national level. Without subnational foresight capacities, national strategies remain disconnected from implementation. Conceiving foresight as a multilevel ecosystem— from ministries to municipalities—allows the long-term to be integrated into the daily practice of public policy. As the OECD (2023a) points out, governments that incorporate the future into daily decision-making are those that articulate anticipation, budgeting, risk management, and policy design across different levels of government.
Ultimately, institutionalising foresight in Latin America is not about replicating models from Finland or Singapore, but about building our own path towards anticipatory governance. The challenge is not only to strengthen institutions, but to redefine how public decisions are made, ensuring that the future and the long term are an active part of the generation, coordination, and evaluation of public policies.
Recommendations for future work
- Develop intertemporal evaluation frameworks that integrate performance metrics, institutional learning, legitimacy, and continuity, linking foresight with fiscal planning and public accountability.
- Conduct a comparative analysis of the interaction between cultural narratives and institutional architectures through case studies in selected Latin American countries (e.g., Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay).
- Create a regional foresight observatory or database to monitor institutional maturity, methodologies used and lessons learned in the region.
- Implement pilot participatory CLA exercises at the subnational level, connecting foresight with territorial development agendas and citizen participation processes.
By moving along these lines, Latin America can move from fragmented experiences of foresight to a systemic culture of anticipation. In this context, governance is no longer limited to reacting to crises and is increasingly deliberately shaped for the future. Foresight becomes an effective language of public action when fragility is no longer understood as a failure but recognised as the starting point of the collective imagination.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues at ECLAC for their constant collaboration, and especially to my friend Dr. Javier Medina, whose guidance and support have been crucial in positioning futures studies within governments across the region. I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues from the Peruvian and Colombian governments, with whom I have worked for many years on these issues. Special thanks go as well to my friends and colleagues from the OECD Government Foresight Community—particularly Rafal, Naoko, and Laura—for their generosity and inspiration, and to my peers in the Global Foresight Network of the World Economic Forum, whose insights continue to enrich and inspire my work.
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