Anticipatory Development Foresight: An approach for international and multilateral organizations

Motivation In the three years before 2023, we have seen multiple parallel crises—from climate emergencies to economic instability, dramatic increases in costs of living, and political insecurities. Looming larger than the risks is the resultant uncertainty. Development agents, including governments, are historically unprepared for managing converging crisis. When risks are analysed and governed in narrow ways, the historically oppressed and excluded continue to carry the brunt of impact. Purpose This article reflects on the question: How can institutions, including governments, become more anticipatory against this backdrop, to ensure that their policy and investment choices do not leave anyone behind due to lack of preparedness? Approach and methods It draws insights from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Asia and the Pacific's efforts since 2020 to apply more future‐fit planning and programming, recognizing that foresight is not an end in itself, but a mechanism for shaping more anticipatory institutions. It is based on qualitative learning synthesized from over three years of work to establish new systems, capabilities and processes for UNDP and its partners to engage in anticipatory risk and planning. Findings Practices rooted in strategic foresight and anticipation can support institutions to incorporate long‐term thinking in planning and analysis, but their translation into development decisions and investments requires shifts in perspectives and risk appetite. Historically, strategic foresight has not been mainstreamed within international organizations and governments owing to: failing to embed anticipation into core systems and processes; giving more attention to tools and building skills than to the demand for alternative decision‐making models and to risk tolerance; relying overly on external support and static models; insufficiently attending to organizational culture and relational drivers of thinking and action. Policy implications We suggest four interconnected levers to help sustain impact and equity when bringing anticipatory approaches into policy processes: ensure design elasticity to encourage local, context‐specific models of anticipatory decision‐making; build anticipatory systems as a base to understand future risks, harms, and correlating impacts; interrogate what counts as legitimate and relevant evidence for policy decisions; cultivate imagination as an act of inquiry.