Increased acknowledgement of climate change and other forms of global interdependence such as financial and communicable diseases demonstrates the need for global systems for resilience—the capacity to anticipate, respond, and recover from disasters such as tsunamis, massive migrations due to water shortages, prolonged electric or Internet outrages, financial crashes, and conflicts. New technological and social innovations present opportunities too often missed by policymakers. The status of every country’s futures research and strategy unit’s capacity should be identified, upgraded where needed, and linked with similar units around the world, including the UN Secretariat and other international bodies like WHO and the World Bank. Best practices could be shared, research compared, assumptions verified, and long-range understandings communicated. Initial efforts in this direction have been taken by UNIDO, the EU, and international futurist organizations. A checklist of ways to better connect futures research to decisionmaking is available in Chapter 11 of the attached CD.
We need more future-oriented educated publics to elect more future-oriented global-minded politicians. Forecasts of ozone depletion led to the timely decisions in the Montreal Protocol. Human rights forecasts by the KGB led to perestroyka. Population forecasts led to family planning. Forecasts in books such as Silent Spring and Limits to Growth stimulated many environmental protection programs. Daily complexities of current problems compete for time to consider the bigger picture. Corporate stockholders want quick profits, forcing corporate leaders to focus on actions that can improve the next quarter’s results; government leaders give priority to immediate issues to retain power; NGO leaders who may look at the longer term often tend to do so only from the perspective of a single issue; leaders of international organizations also tend to focus on one issue and can be overwhelmed by the difficulty of addressing multiple interdependent issues on a global basis; and news executives are driven by daily deadlines and the need to keep people’s attention by emphasizing the negative dramas of the moment. As a result, decisionmakers feel little pressure to consider global long-term perspectives.
Nevertheless, attaining long-range goals like landing on the moon or eradicating smallpox that were considered impossible inspired many people to go beyond selfish, short-term interests to great achievements. An international assessment of such future goals is found in Chapter 7 on the CD. The UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015 have become benchmarks for progress, focusing international cooperation and increased sensitivity to global long-term perspectives. International negotiators struggle each day to reach agreements that reflect long-term and global thinking. There is an increasing recognition that accelerating change requires longer-term perspectives.
National legislatures could establish standing “Committees for the Future,” as Finland has done; an International Committee for the Future could focus global futures research for policymakers; governments could establish future-oriented inter-agency teams with high-level guidance to coordinate policy using executive information management systems and dashboard software that reinforces global long-range thinking. Foresight studies that have been done by many countries should be continually updated, improved, and conducted interactively with other national long-range efforts.
Government budgets should consider 5–10 year allocations attached to rolling 5–10 year scenarios and strategies. Decisionmakers and policy advisers should be trained in systematic and integrated use of futures research. A system should be created to document and share scientists’ views on the long-term implications of their research. Each of the 15 Global Challenges in this chapter and the 8 UN Millennium Development Goals could be the basis for transinstitutional coalitions composed of governments, corporations, NGOs, universities, and international organizations that are willing to commit the resources and talent to address a specific goal. The world has become too complex to be managed by nation-state hierarchies alone; new patterns of governance are emerging to better manage global long-term decisionmaking. Since the global State of the Future Index (see Chapter 2) is based on indicators that relate to progress on global challenges, a 10-year positive forecast could imply that deci-sionmaking is increasingly taking global long-term perspectives into account. If national SOFIs were constructed and used in evaluating policymakers’ performance, decisionmakers would be more inclined to pursue policies that address the longer term. The World Bank could use it in loan decisions.
Efforts to increase the number and quality of courses on futures concepts and methods should be supported, as well as augmenting standard curricula with futures methodologies converted to teaching techniques that help future-orient instruction. Communications and advertising companies can create memes to help the public become more future-oriented. Prizes should be given to recognize the best examples of global long-term decisionmaking. We also need to create participatory policymaking processes informed by futures research, organize data for easier use in foresight and policy analysis, and develop software for note-taking in strategy action formats.
Challenge 5 will be addressed seriously when foresight functions are a routine part of most organizations and governments, when national SOFIs are used in at least 50 countries, when the consequences of high-risk projects are routinely considered before they are initiated, and when standing Committees for the Future exist in at least 50 national legislatures.
Regional Considerations Africa: Nigeria announced plans to have most government services available online by 2008. For 10 years UNDP/African Futures worked with governments to incorporate long-term perspectives into mid- and short-term planning. Since the early 1980s, when some African countries had to launch structural adjustment programs, the issue of orienting policymaking toward a global long-term perspective has continually been raised.
Europe: The 7th Framework Programme of the EU expands foresight support, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies provides futures studies for EU decisionmaking, and Europe is creating the Health Early Warning System. Foresight was included in the Russian Federal Program 2007–12 and will use Delphis and scenarios to set S&T priorities. Global long-term thinking is being stimulated by public finances for social and health services for an aging population, restructuring energy systems, changing ethnic demographics, and geopolitical shifts such as the emergence of China.
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