Chapter 12. Using foresight methods to adapt development co-operation for the future

Rising challenges in development co-operation

Development co-operation is facing multiple simultaneous bottlenecks and challenges, including how to engage with new topics and technologies, which, as emphasised by Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator in his “In My View” piece, raise the stakes for action to leave no one behind. Development co-opertation is also challenged to adapt to an evolving global landscape, to build better partnerships, improve authentic multi-stakeholder dialogue and enable sustainable investments beyond the electoral cycle.

In a survey conducted by the OECD in 2015, partner countries anticipated that development challenges will undergo significant shifts, focusing on sustainable economic growth and equitable growth for the poorest, employment opportunities, climate change and agricultural productivity. They also anticipated that development co-operation providers will need to play a more enabling role to meet these challenges in the future (Davies and Pickering, 2015_[4]).

Yet despite encouraging gains, evidence also indicates that development co-operation is struggling to adapt to a dynamic and evolving development landscape where concerted efforts is required to unblock systemic bottlenecks (OECD-UNDP, 2016_[5]). It faces a growing need for strategies that are adaptive and responsive to rapid change and high uncertainty. Traditional, linear planning approaches based on historic data and narrow forecasts may have limited use within highly evolving or rapidly changing environments where planners lack necessary understanding and evidence (UNDP-GCPSE, 2014_[6]).2 The future cannot be predicted, and preparing only for what is expected is risky.

The 2030 Agenda requires all sections of societies and communities to contribute their ideas, insights, resources, action and oversight to transform and redesign policy, to co-create strategy, and to ensure implementation and accountability (OCDE, 2018_[7]). Dynamic and innovative partnerships are vital in the effort to leave no one behind, where the combined contributions of all development actors can lead to more inclusion (GPEDC, 2016_[8]). The Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation sets openness, trust, mutual respect and learning at the core of effective and inclusive partnerships, recognising the different and complementary roles of all development actors: governments, bilateral and multilateral organisations, civil society, the private sector, and representatives from parliaments and trade unions, among others (GPEDC, 2011_[9]). Evidence from the Making Development Co-operation More Effective 2016 Progress Report (OECD-UNDP, 2016_[5]) has shown a positive evolution towards more inclusive partnerships in many countries, with readiness to engage demonstrated by all parties. However, constraints persist on the organisational side.3 To realise fully inclusive partnerships, the development community needs to explore new approaches to strengthening multi-stakeholder dialogue at the country level, fully reflecting the diversity of stakeholders and maximising the synergies among them (OECD-UNDP, 2016_[5]).

Finally, there is great uncertainty around sustaining political support for the SDGs through to 2030. Political cycles lead to changes in leadership and priorities, which complicates efforts to sustain focus and investments on longer term results and visions. Keeping-up efforts on SDG implementation going beyond the electoral cycle will be an ongoing challenge: decision makers need to find an equilibrium between the intergenerational nature of the SDGs and short-term development priorities (Davies and Pickering, 2015_[4]).

Strategic foresight: Preparing development co-operation for alternative futures

Strategic foresight is not a synonym for forecasting or prediction, although forecasts and predictions are useful inputs for it. Strategic foresight is an organised, systematic process for engaging with uncertainty. It enables the identification of future opportunities and challenges in a complex, volatile and disruptive environment (OECD, 2018_[10]). History is important, and foresight also uses historic data, but the lessons from the past do not always translate usefully to the present; instead of predicting by extrapolating past trend lines, foresight generates questions that help decision makers understand and shape the future. It harnesses the capacity to think systematically about the future to inform decisions today – a capacity developed by individuals, within organisations and within society (Conway, 2015_[11]). As such, it has three key benefits.

First, strategic foresight helps prepare for alternative futures. By adopting a “what if?” approach to specific situations, foresight has the merit of expanding the range of plausible alternative futures beyond the most expected ones, allowing decision makers to prepare better. Foresight helps reveal assumptions, explore emerging drivers of change, identify and analyse trends, and bridge the expectations of multiple stakeholders. It seeks to identify steps that need to be taken to shape the future in desirable ways; however, it also draws attention to weak signals which indicate that a disruption away from the current status quo may occur, and to the possibility of “black swan” events.4

Second, strategic foresight helps communities, organisations and leaders develop a common vision and purpose. Understanding alternative futures allows leaders and communities to understand how these may emerge, what is desirable and undesirable, and how to move towards their desired future. Foresight helps stakeholders make their assumptions about the future explicit, challenge them, and engage with multiple alternatives. This helps them build a common understanding of what kind of future they desire, the basis for a shared vision.

Finally, strategic foresight can help transform development policy making towards an agile and outward-facing approach that reflects today’s volatile, interdependent and uncertain world (Davies and Pickering, 2015_[4]). It helps to build organisational culture to seek out, consider and prepare for the unexpected, as part of a strategic planning approach (Mintzberg and Jorgensen, 1987_[12]). Over time, people and organisations develop “futures literacy” (Miller, 2007_[13]) and scan the environment, more alert to possible developments. Current strategies, capabilities and concepts can be stress-tested against possible alternative scenarios and foresight can help develop robust new ideas. Strategic foresight succeeds when leaders and organisations challenge the “official future” – the implicit organisational view of the future, which is usually a continuation of the status quo.

Strategic foresight for the SDGs

The world is not on track to achieve the 2030 Agenda (OECD, 2017_[14]); (Ritchie, 2018_[15]). In the 12 years remaining, the trajectory of progress towards the SDGs will have to undergo a major transformational change. How can countries so rapidly achieve the necessary scale and ambition of change, while leaving no one behind? A common, strong and collaborative vision of an aspirational future can contribute. The 2030 Agenda is a starting point for that vision – and strategic foresight processes can help bring communities, businesses and civil society together with government to clarify the details, the roadmaps and the joint aspirational vision at national and local levels to generate momentum, new commitments and resources, and radical new ideas (Box 12.1).

Strategic foresight is not a silver bullet, but a potential complementary approach for development co-operation. Its methods can help the development community engage with uncertainty and develop solutions that meet the existing and future needs of all people, thus supporting necessary improvements in the quality, effectiveness and impact of development co-operation (UNDP-GCPSE, 2014_[6]); (Krake, 2018_[16]). It can help create future-ready, alert institutions that adapt as the future evolves, contributing to countries’ strategic planning and budgetary capacities. And the development community can use it to consciously explore how changes (whether slow, compound annual trends or fast, disruptive shifts) might threaten communal well-being and SDG achievement.

The mindset of those engaged in strategic foresight is one that seeks to embrace, rather than control, uncertainty. One way they do this is by seeking out “pockets of the future”, which frequently lie on the periphery, in communities which are outside of the “centre” (Sharpe, 2013_[17]) and may, indeed, be left behind. When applying strategic foresight to the SDGs, it will be especially important to bring in those who are left behind and are failing to participate in the benefits of development. When all members of a community are able to collaboratively discuss their futures, the results can be deeply empowering for those on the margins, who are in a position to establish “stories for the storyless”.5

The growing discipline of foresight: Examples

Although strategic foresight has been established as a discipline for some 70 years, it has been on the periphery of governance, policy making and public administration practice until recently. It is perhaps unsurprising that there has been a rush of interest in strategic foresight across the private, public and not-for-profit sectors in a time of financial crises, new disruptive technologies like blockchain (Box 12.2), migration flows and volatile oil prices. At the same time, increased interest within international development and related fields results, in part, from the 2030 Agenda itself. It is an agenda that requires long-term thinking, and it proposes that to achieve the future we want for the world, and to ensure no one is left behind, means to plan for the future strategically and collaboratively.

In OECD countries, interest in strategic foresight is manifest in national development planning exercises with a growing number of “national strategic narratives” and cross-cutting, integrated whole-of-government planning approaches, including in donor development agencies. Many governments around the world are using strategic foresight with different purposes, informing agendas and identifying new solutions, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of consultations, and creating multidisciplinary connections between policy silos.

In countries like Canada, Finland and Slovenia, these systemic approaches to the future are taking place at a whole-of-government level; in others such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, they are being conducted within ministries; while in Australia, research organisations are supporting the government in the effort.6 Many other national governments are realising that effective long-term policy making requires governance innovation in the executive branch, bureaucracy, legislature and judiciary, where many new units, structures and roles are being created – even Ministers of the Future.7 In some cases, this includes creating national development strategies. For instance, Finland’s vision, enshrined in the implementation plan of the National Commission on Sustainable Development, provides a long-term framework for sustainability. Among its priority actions are aligning foresight activities more closely with SDG implementation, developing competence among government officials, and creating conditions for long-term work.

In Germany, the 2013 coalition agreement established a more systematic within-ministerial activity including the German Corporation for International Co-operation, as well as a cross-ministerial network led by the Federal Academy for Security Policy. The latest coalition agreement reinforced this activity – despite short-term internal and external pressures including migration and trade disputes – establishing a foresight unit in the Chancellery. National development agencies have also adopted foresight approaches, in Germany and in other Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland.

Head of Political Staff, German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, Michael Krake (2018).

Other examples include the network of Future Generation Commissioners from 13 countries; the Welsh Assembly’s 2015 Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which established the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner with legal duties and policy incentives (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, 2015_[27]); the campaign for a Lords Committee for Future Generations in the UK8 ; as well as the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System, a collaboration between the European Institutions.9 This cross-system, multi-actor approach to establishing institutions for the longer term is absolutely necessary to create an ecosystem of governance institutions that is strong enough to resist the constant pressure to focus on the present.

In emerging economies, too, development planning processes are increasingly moving from the control of a single ministry (of planning or finance) to a cross-departmental approach embedded in a wider and longer-term understanding of the international context. In some cases they are also becoming more flexible, participative and iterative, as is happening in Colombia, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Pakistan, Rwanda and Tunisia. There have been foresight exercises at city and regional levels, with Brazil and Indonesia conducting interesting examples; commitments to institutions to introduce new planning practices, such as in Thailand; and collaborations, such as between Cameroon and UNICEF (UNICEF, 2018_[28]). In many countries strategic foresight is becoming a powerful, effective way to harness diverse views in a unified approach to national planning – with Latin American ministries of planning, as well as Mauritius and South Africa, being particularly innovative and committed to this agenda.

Niroshan Perera, Sri Lankan Minister of National Policies and Economic Affairs (2016_[29])

Transformative examples of foresight within civil society tend to be under-reported and under-acknowledged. These include the North Star Scenarios for Port Elizabeth, South Africa by the Northern Areas People’s Development Initiative (Reos Institute, 2013_[30]) the Society for International Development work in the Horn of Africa since the 1990s; and work by the International Civil Society Centre (ICSC, 2018_[31])10 and Inter-Agency Regional Analysts Network (IARAN)11 convening development and humanitarian actors to explore the sectoral structures, policies and responses needed to meet future humanitarian needs.

We are also witnessing increased innovation and co-operation in multi-stakeholder development initiatives, including between international agencies and multilaterals, OECD donor ministries, and other development actors like international NGOs, businesses and civil society.

Within the United Nations, the Secretary-General’s and Deputy Secretary-General’s development reforms emphasise the importance of the role of Resident Co-ordinators using strategic foresight to carry out a “One UN” approach in country and to support the government working with its development partners to achieve the SDGs. Other examples include:

• The International Monetary Fund has recently been using scenario planning in its Africa programme, as well as to develop organisational preparedness and capabilities to respond to upcoming global crise (IMF, 2009_[32]).

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Future Literacy Labs and network are promoting innovative thinking and solutions.

• Work by the United Nations Children’s Fund Tajikistan to mainstream issues of ethnicity, youth and employment has resulted in exceptional youth engagement in shaping the future (UNICEF, 2018_[28]).

• The International Labour Organisation and United Nations Development Program project on the future of youth employment in Egypt shows the power of cross-donor collaboration (Feki, 19 April 2017_[33]).

• The International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) is working with national supreme audit bodies to examine their role in ensuring government ministries create policy that is aware of the long term.

• The Omidyar Network is examining the potential for combining design thinking, systems thinking and strategic foresight approaches to accelerate social transformation in the work it supports, in Nigeria and elsewhere.

• Foresight is also becoming a key tool for the OECD’s work (Box 12.3).

A roadmap for implementing strategic foresight

With a renewed interest in foresight, there is also a growing acknowledgement that the act of reflecting on the future collectively – and the capability to do so – is valuable for all communities and countries, at all times. It is central to the act of development itself, and critical if the world is to meet the SDGs. Foresight is not a luxury; it is a necessity.

As the development co-operation community seeks to ensure real progress towards ensuring no one is left behind, they need to make strategic foresight an integral part of policy and action. To enrich their policies and guide strategic leadership in implementing the SDGs for all, Providers of development co-operation can harness strategic foresight to be future fit and build on insights from it to explore futures together.