LDC Insight #6: Anticipatory Governance for LDCs: Getting Ahead of Fragility

15 November 2022 / Aarathi Krishnan

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Since COVID-19 upended our world two years ago, many spoke of a ‘new normal’ - the advent of new governance mechanisms, new approaches - as a lesson learnt of how existing systems were not fit for the types of global shocks the world was experiencing. Two years later, we are now at the precipice of uncertainty. What we are going to be facing in the next decades - is not anything we have experienced before at the scale that we will be experiencing it.

We are going to experience compounding, intersecting systemic and existential risks, and possibly disasters, wars and injustices at a scale not seen before.

What we are grappling with is more than an increase of risks – looming larger is the resulting surge in uncertainty. As one example - In 2022, the conflict in Ukraine, compounded by global events related to climate risks and food production constraints, led to heightened vulnerability in Pakistan across numerous dimensions – from severe wheat shortages to a reduced energy supply. Examples like this also underscore the reality that “in the Anthropocene, the local is no longer local” and “the global is not just global” with patterns and processes that may rapidly disperse because of scale, connectivity and speed. It means that a risk analysis framework for a policy or programme has to account for not only the known variables but also for the unknowns including the ways the outcomes of a local intervention may be influenced by and trigger effects in other areas and regions, AND across different timelines. Events occurring in one part of the world will have compounding butterfly effects in other parts of the world, and manifested in unequal ways particularly in least developing nations, that already experience severe structural impediments to their own development trajectories.

As our recent UNDP Human Development Report cited this year “The layering and interactions of multidimensional risks and the overlapping of threats give rise to new dimensions of uncertainty, if for no other reason than human choices have impacts well beyond our weakened socio ecological systems’ capacities to absorb them”¹. These types of exponential, intersecting, multidimensional risks and uncertainties makes it almost impossible to assign accountability for mitigation measures and thus subsequently to govern.  It means then that these manifestations are not priceable in our existing accounting methods, society, and economy - and thus get left ignored. How then do we price these types of risks to human life or planetary existence? Conversely, how do we price or value the risk of civilisation breakdown (as Indy Johar argues²)? And when we can’t price, nor govern nor assign accountability to these types of risks and uncertainties - then now as always - the historically vulnerable and marginalised, continue to carry the brunt of impact. Though groups of historically vulnerable and marginalised groups exist the world over, larger pockets exist in least developed countries (LDCs) - which then impact on their nations abilities to upward mobilise.

As an example, UNDP Regional Bureau for Asia and Pacific argues in our recent report Reimagining Development³ that interconnected, volatile and uncertain risks are illustrated in particular by widely varied digital futures. Technological innovation of recent decades has instigated new possibilities for both progress and harm, whether by design or as the consequences of failures to anticipate risks and unintended effects. Dramatic advancements in technology in recent times have the potential to uplift millions from poverty, open access to education and information and democratise civic participation and engagement. However, with ever more of our lives and civic functions operating online, we are seeing nascent digital infrastructures enshrine, exacerbate, and accelerate existing socioeconomic inequities. Given the rate at which interconnected risks can become compounded, the risks associated with continued digital evolution in the absence of necessary governance evolutions to establish new principles and standards is pivotal. It is important to ensure all people have access to safe, reliable essential infrastructure – digital and civic – to not compound the risks of existing vulnerabilities and carry forward past systems of harm into our futures. Bold action is needed which includes the need for more anticipatory policy measures (meaning policy dynamism that anticipates and is proactive in assessing future threats and directing resources to mitigate associated risks).

The lack of such anticipatory measures points to the faultline in our risk governance systems that are not equipped to deal with downstream accountability over multiple timelines.  Global governance systems seemingly keep being taken by surprise - always a step behind shocks, conflict, new complex disasters, new vulnerabilities. The approaches seem to remain the same - albeit touted as improved. The poor, the uninsured, the disenfranchised, the information-poor, and the less mobile are bearing the brunt, as they always have. If LDCs will bear the brunt of unanticipated risk and increased uncertainty, their ability to create norms of freedom, of thriving for their societies fall behind. In clearer terms, if LDCs do not have the existing structural infrastructure and investments for existing risks and vulnerabilities, futures of compounding risk and uncertainties will most certainly impact their capacity to reduce economic and human vulnerability, and in fact, arguably could increase it.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the need for urgent action, we lack proven practices and extensive experience in addressing interconnected and systemic risks. Conventional risk management practices have evolved based on learning from the past. When new risks emerge, experts generally analyse the new risk, find ways to limit its damage, then incorporate the lessons learned from the experience for next time. It is not just that we need new technical approaches and assessment frameworks for understanding and managing risk, but equally new paradigms through which to make decisions that balance current and future needs, particularly when dealing with complex and uncertain trade-offs⁴. In Asia Pacific, UNDP is experimenting with approaches to anticipatory crisis and risk assessments to get ahead of potential political and economic crisis. To achieve this, we are experimenting with blending a range of different risk indicators to provide a more holistic and contemporary view of crisis, including blending economic, social, political, technological, crisis and environmental risks utilising integrated horizon scanning and collective intelligence.

As costs compound and the landscape of risks evolve, so too must the ways we conceive of the values that underpin mainstream development models. For example, freedom, as the development philosopher Dr. A.K. Shiva Kumar has said, “means protection from the risks that people experience every day.”⁵ Yet, freedom will also mean protection from the risks that people will experience in the future. How might we better orient our decision-making frames and prioritisation processes to navigate the needs and desires of both present and future generations?

The need to address these issues has seen a surge in the push for strategic foresight - to be anticipatory in the face of emerging changes and risks. Global governance of foresight in practice attempts to blend imaginations of what the future might be with action in the present that requires changes in policies, practices, risk anticipation, decision making, culture, and investments that governments, and multilateral institutions, need to adopt.

More than the utility and relevance of foresight-informed insights, however, institutionalising the use of foresight into planning processes calls for future-fit governance systems. Anticipatory governance is one such model. Being anticipatory in this sense means our ability to facilitate, anticipate and consider multiple future implications in governance arrangements and outcomes; to respond with agility and course correct in the event of unanticipated risks or opportunities; and to ensure that business processes and oversight shift from compliance focused to being risk-informed, adaptive and focused on meeting high level objectives in fast changing circumstances. In short, to be anticipatory means the ability to act and make decisions in preparation for what could happen. It is the architecture by which governments and institutions systemize the links between foresight, planning and continuous shifts in action and policy.

The applied use of foresight – and the shifts needed at the level of institutional processes, infrastructure, operational agility, culture, relationships, and mindsets to make space for the meaningful application of knowledge about future risks and opportunities in decision making, planning, and implementation of policies and programmes – is the work of anticipatory governance. It entails processes to build the supportive ecosystems and institutional muscles to realise the transformational effects of more forward-looking methods for planning and programming.

Some core pillars for building anticipatory governance include⁶:

• A foresight system (providing the means to generate and interpret knowledge about the future)
• Pathways to integrate intelligence about the future into policies and implementation
• A feedback system to assess outcomes
• An overall shift in culture and structures.

UNDP Asia Pacific is embedding anticipatory governance approaches in countries such as Bhutan, Cambodia, and Vanuatu where country offices are working with their governments on different entry points in national planning and programming to be more forward looking.

While strengthening resilience in the face of uncertainty is in part a function of incorporating more systematic consideration of long-term, future risk within ongoing policy or programmatic analyses, the risk lens to navigate the future is not a catch-all⁷. Whereas a risk-driven approach to being anticipatory supports the formulation of actions on the basis of what might occur – it is equally necessary to plan for unknown unknowns. This seemingly paradoxical form of planning ultimately connects to the ways that governance frameworks are designed. Most mainstream governance is optimised to address what is, or theoretically can be, known with a relative degree of predictability. For instance, defining measurement frameworks and success indicators based on evidence and patterns from the past, or projections of the future, means that more attention and resources are channelled to the ‘known’ or conceivable development trajectories and, in some cases, anticipated disruptions or risks. The question then is how governance can be designed to ascribe as much weight to what cannot be assigned any reliable probability of unfolding, or to what cannot even be conceived of, particularly when how it might play out can have such consequential impacts for states already weighed down with fragility. One such pathway for keeping ahead of risks, is to embed horizon scanning as a way to monitor changing contexts and to analyse implications through a systems approach of understanding the impacts of converging risk or change signals.

Being anticipatory calls for enhanced capabilities and infrastructure by which policymakers and societies can exercise moral imagination and dialectical thinking. With less risks that can be “priced and crystallizable” when thinking about our complex development futures, we need to also talk about the price or value of a human and how to price unanticipated risks to human life, human thriving and development. Without this shift of thinking, those least secure in our world will continue to bear the brunt of unanticipated shocks and crisis.