What the Global South Can Teach Us About Strategic Foresight
From Observation to Ownership
This week I reviewed a powerful new publication: “Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight in Action: Insights from the Global South” (May 2025) — a joint report by the United Nations Futures Lab and the International Science Council.
This is more than a survey of interesting practices. It’s evidence of a strategic shift — one that moves foresight away from disconnected scenario development and toward embedded governance, localized innovation, and systems-level transformation.
What stands out isn’t just the diversity of tools (though causal layered analysis, backcasting, horizon scanning, and the Six Pillars framework are all represented).
It’s how foresight is being used differently:
→ As governance infrastructure.
→ As intergenerational design.
→ As resilience architecture.
→ And as a challenge to extractive, top-down planning models.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
🔹 Foresight as Governance Infrastructure
In Vietnam, foresight was formally embedded into national policy through a country-level partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization. The Ministry of Planning co-led a structured foresight process using forecasting dashboards, quantitative scenario modeling, and multi-stakeholder policy formulation labs. These were not run as external consultations — they were internalized into the structure of national planning, directly shaping the Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development Strategy (2021–2030) and its Food Systems Transformation Action Plan.
In Nigeria, Osun State partnered with UNICEF and academic institutions to conduct horizon scanning, foresight mapping, and policy development workshops with lawmakers, social service agencies, and local leaders. Outputs from these exercises were directly translated into Nigeria’s first Subnational Social Protection Law, passed in 2018. Foresight was not a supplement — it was the foundation of policy content and legislative timing.
🔹 Foresight as Intergenerational Design
In New Zealand, the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei hapū (sub-tribe) initiated a 50-year population foresight process. They developed and administered their own community-led demographic survey, distinct from the national census, then combined it with trend analysis and Māori knowledge frameworks to model future needs in housing, healthcare, and cultural preservation. The process was led across generations, designed to anchor strategic decisions in whakapapa (genealogy) and manaakitanga (collective care).
In Colombia, Afro-Colombian and Amazonian youth leaders led localized foresight workshops that used backcasting, participatory scenario development, and storytelling methods to envision just, inclusive futures. These workshops were supported by the United Nations Population Fund and formally included in Colombia’s National Development Plan. Critically, they were conducted in native languages, using culturally relevant metaphors, allowing foresight to emerge as a decolonial planning mechanism rather than a technical exercise.
🔹 Foresight as Resilience Architecture
In Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, National Red Cross Societies embedded foresight tools into their food security and livelihoods programs through a structured systems innovation model. They mapped drivers of change, developed community-driven future portfolios, and translated them into pilot programs using backcasting and prototyping. The result: foresight wasn’t positioned upstream of crisis — it was built into the operational DNA of humanitarian programming.
In Sudan, the United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur applied foresight directly to peacekeeping operations. Field teams ran localized trend mapping, created a conflict risk classification matrix, and used seasonal forecasts to predict areas of heightened vulnerability. Based on this, they implemented 15 mitigation strategies, including altered patrol schedules, preemptive mediation dialogues, and coordinated early warnings — timed to the agricultural calendar and grounded in local dynamics.
🔹 Foresight as a Challenge to Extractive Planning Models
In Bolivia, indigenous farming communities led a hybrid foresight process that combined ancestral ecological knowledge, bioindicators (e.g., animal migration and seasonal shifts), and modern scenario planning. The goal was not just documentation — the process produced 30 validated agricultural and disaster mitigation practices now integrated into local governance systems. Foresight here was not conducted on communities — it was conducted by them.
In South Africa, the Northern Areas People’s Development Initiative created a suite of scenarios based on fictional characters that reflected everyday lived experience: “Lucky Star,” “Fallen Star,” “Bright Star.” These were used not as stories but as community planning tools — anchoring conversations around education, safety, and urban resilience. The use of fictional narrative over institutional jargon made foresight cognitively and emotionally accessible, particularly in communities still carrying the burdens of apartheid-era disinvestment.
Each of these examples points to a foresight model that doesn’t rely on future prediction — but on current system transformation.
It’s not just that the Global South is using foresight.
It’s that foresight there is owned, embedded, and adaptive — shaping laws, plans, missions, and mindsets.
This is a different kind of signal — not about what’s coming, but about how the future is being built. And who is building it.
