Anticipatory Governance 2025

As governments face increasingly complex and uncertain futures, the need for institutionalizing anticipatory capacity—enabling governments to proactively shape and navigate potential future scenarios—has become critical. This paper presents findings from a comparative, multi-country project that examined how diverse governments are embedding anticipatory governance practices into their structures and policies. The project, spanning three European countries, Lithuania, Italy, and Malta, offers insights into both the successes and challenges of fostering foresight and adaptive capacities within legacy bureaucratic systems.

Drawing on in-depth case studies and policy analysis, the research explores key dimensions of anticipatory capacity: the creation of strategic foresight units, the development of futures literacy programs for foresight practitioners, policy professionals, and senior decision-makers, and the development of organizational frameworks capable of responding to complex, non-linear policy environments. It highlights how governments are moving beyond traditional regulatory approaches to embrace foresight, risk management, and systemic resilience in the face of technological, environmental, and social disruptions.

The findings suggest that successful institutionalization of anticipatory capacity requires more than foresight techniques. It involves rethinking organizational structures, enhancing policy coherence, and fostering a culture of long-term thinking that transcends electoral cycles. Furthermore, the project demonstrates the importance of introducing foresight through direct experience and the importance of embedding new anticipatory functions within existing governance structures.

This paper offers practical strategies and comparative lessons for transforming reactive governance into anticipatory systems. The recommendations emphasize the importance of adaptive governance models that can effectively manage complexity, utilize strategic foresight, and empower governments to thrive in an increasingly uncertain world.

Jeanette Kwek, the Head of Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF) will conduct a sharing on Singapore’s experience in applying anticipatory leadership and strategic foresight to address future challenges. The session covers the approach that the CSF undertakes to build foresight capabilities and capacity in Singapore’s public service and how the Centre develops insights into future trends, discontinuities and strategic surprises.

Anticipatory governance is widely understood as a means of engaging with future uncertainty and overcoming bureaucratic inertia or reactivity to shape better outcomes for governments, their constituents, and even the world at large. It is often framed as a solution to the challenges posed by accelerating technological change, social and political disruptions, economic instability, and, most urgently, the climate emergency. In many cases, this vision aligns with real-world practices, as governments and organisations at local, national, and global levels implement forward-thinking frameworks, policies, and initiatives.

At the same time, some actors employ anticipatory governance in ways that not only fail to resolve the very problems they claim to address but actively fuel and exacerbate them by focusing on short-term gratification and serving their own narrow, self-serving interests, as well as those of similarly narrow and exclusionary affiliated groups. Such abuses of the future reinforce the status quo and, at times, even attempt to function as a vehicle for returning to an (imagined) past.

In this talk, I will examine both the transformative and destructive dimensions of anticipatory governance. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt, I will explore the politics of anticipation and discuss the role and responsibilities of futurists, thinkers, and foresight practitioners in what Žižek termed the “times of monsters”

The paper will argue that governments need to mobilise what I call ‘generative shared intelligence’. This provides a broader framework for understanding and shaping the role of data and AI, citizen engagement and evidence, and much more. It’s relevant both to the internal plumbing of governments – how they achieve results – but also to the renewal of democracy since it focuses attention on the gold in peoples’ heads, the insights of citizens, workers and families, as well as hardware and data. It requires:

• Recognition of the dynamic, unpredictable and complex nature of the contexts governments work in – contexts that are shifting, non-linear and always hard to grasp fully. Uncertainty and change are the new normal.

• Ability to mobilise all the different kinds of intelligence necessary to understand and act effectively, and respond quickly to pressures, including many different kinds of data, algorithms, science, evidence and knowledge, as well as tacit knowledge and citizen insight …

• A commitment to sharing that intelligence as widely as possible both inside government and outside, so as to …

• Enable regeneration of the economy, society, politics and environment.

Governing with generative shared intelligence (GSI) should, I argue, be the defining goal for all governments, a mindset and method that runs through everything they do. The approaches which then follow are very different from past traditions of public administration. These were often designed for more stable and predictable environments. They focused primarily on law and authority on the one hand, alongside finance and economics on the other. They viewed intelligence as something to be hoarded not shared. And they thought in terms of discrete problem solving rather than cultivating a generative capability across society. The GSI approaches aim to avoid the mistake often made by governments around technology (from smart cities to AI) which typically exaggerates how much technology alone can solve problems, rather than addressing how combinations of different kinds of intelligence can contribute to better outcomes.

The evolution of human social organization – from tribal kinship to monarchies and empires, then to nation-states, and finally to multi-national market-driven societies – has produced both significant progress and systemic discontents, such as ecological precariousness, inequality, and breaches in the social contract. These discontents, exacerbated by reactive governance models that prioritize political institutionalism and market efficiency over contextually relevant societal well-being and human-community-ecological thriving, stem from a retreat of the normative ideal of the “good society” as a guiding framework for social organization. Anticipatory governance, with “good societies” as its central units of analysis within a multi-level frame (local, national, regional, global), offers a proactive solution to these systemic breakdowns. A solution to both the technical complexities of large-scale development as well as the soft challenges of meaningful participative governance. This approach integrates foresight, collective strategic adaptation, with shared ethical reflection (such as through reciprocal frame reflection in policy processes) to address complex technical and developmental challenges while fostering a discursive mechanism for a renewed sense of communal thriving. Methodologically, inspiration is drawn from historical cultural mores such as the Ummah, Shura- Adl, Ren (humaneness), Li (ritual/propriety), and Yi, Dharma (moral order) – Karuna, Kingdom of God, égalité, solidarité, fraternité, Ubuntu – Ujamaa – Gadaa, and Buen Vivir, Zapatismo, to reimagine and crucially, reorder human society as that – society – with secondary characteristics of politics and economics. Thus, conscientious anticipatory governance seeks to realign societal evolution toward justice, equity, and sustainability, while taking account of pragmatic and evolutionary structural imperatives, countering the governance crisis precipitated by both paradigm and scale mismatches in contemporary governance systems.

Anticipatory Governance can be understood in either a broader or narrower way. According to its broader understanding, Anticipatory Governance addresses the most intriguing aspects of the general context in which governments are embedded, ranging from the global transition towards new social and political frameworks that presently are only poorly detectable, to the promises and threads of unbelievably powerful technologies, to the emergence of complexity as a new scientific paradigm.

The narrower interpretation of Anticipatory Governance tends instead to focus on changes internal to the working rules of actual governments.

Both interpretations are needed. The problem I see is that only rarely the two readings of Anticipatory Governance talk one another. The proposals advanced by those understanding Anticipatory Governance in a broader sense often fail to translate into programs to be explicitly tested and implemented; similarly, the proposals advanced by those understanding Anticipatory Governance in a narrower sense tend to forget that we are living a global transition, occasionally called polycrisis.

In my talk I’ll present a possible way to connect the two understanding of Anticipatory Governance by exploiting the Net Assessment framework, an innovative and still little known framework exploited by the American intelligence and developed by Andrew Marshall.

This presentation will highlight seven different interconnected dimensions of support for wilding anticipatory governance. Each dimension will be illustrated by practical examples from over two decades of futures and foresight work in public, NGO, and corporate governance. Dimensions discussed will include:

– locating the meadow in the landscape – finding and preparing places fertile for anticipation and futures work;
– exploring the the system diversity – components, actors, perspectives;
– gathering seeds on the wind – horizon scanning and patterns of change;
– imagining liminality and emergence – images and narratives of potential and becoming;
– scattering seeds on the wind – engagement and distributing insights;
– supporting the roots and stalks – learning systems and change activation;
– measuring growth and spread – evaluating outcomes.

The presentation will focus on how we as practicing futures and foresight researchers embed ourselves in the anticipatory ecologies we wish to nurture – and that nurture us.

This presentation is a product of sustained research into the nature and possible consequences of the IT revolution many of them unintended. IT in general was initially characterised as being enabling of many purposes and projects, but it soon resulted in creating new dependencies. The latter quickly caused many people and organisations to become more vulnerable. Most recently it has become a domain of systemic threat such that anticipations of the future have become increasingly Dystopian.

Recent work, however, makes it possible to not only describe the rise of technoscience as a civilisation-shaping force, but also to contest it and propose alternative approaches that imply other trajectories and less technologically determined ways of life. Related to this is the rise of so-called ‘AI’ which introduces new dimensions of hazard and uncertainty for which humanity is clearly unprepared.

It is suggested that Critical and Integral Futures bring greater clarity to these concerns. They are augmented by related work that questions the unthinking shift from analogue to digital media and draws attention to an underlying dilemma associated with advanced technology. Namely, that such advances are not only used irresponsibly (by, for example, Internet Oligarchs) but also widely adopted for military purposes and by ‘bad actors’ of all kinds, including criminal organisations and delinquent states.

The presentation concludes on a note of cautious optimism. Namely, that the gift of foresight, of anticipation, provides Homo Sapiens with opportunities to understand and act in defence of its own humanity. Whether those opportunities are taken up and transformed into effective action is another matter entirely.

References
Hassan, R. (2022) Analog, MIT Press.
King, R. (2023). Here be Monsters. Is Technology Reducing our Humanity? Monash University, Melbourne.
Slaughter, R. (2022) Deleting Dystopia. Univ of Southern Queensland, Open source: https://usq.pressbooks.pub/deletingdystopia/