What is foresight

Foresight is a systematic way of engaging with uncertainty by exploring alternative futures, including aspirational ones. As a discipline, it has the potential to shape the future. It is not about predicting the future, but understanding your current and future operating environment. Insights gained from foresight equip communities and organisations to recognise and respond to emerging threats and opportunities by developing enhanced competitiveness, resilience and agility.

A foresight practitioner is anyone who takes a futures approach to their work to explore and understand the impacts of longer-term factors and drivers of change on the future, to understand better how different futures might evolve, and to generate insights for decisions made today.

Why do we need to democratise the future?

Today, the futures and foresight field is still largely dominated by Global North voices from older generations. However, better, fairer and more equitable futures for all can only be built if everyone has the same opportunities to participate meaningfully in this co-creation. In order for all communities to use foresight and have their own conversations about it to shape their futures, they need their own people, methods and approaches.

NGFP is committed to providing a platform for the development and support of younger generations of futures and foresight practitioners, particularly from the Global South. Their needs, experiences, perspectives and methods must equally inform the pathways towards our collective preferred futures.

FORESIGHT PROJECTS

LATEST UPDATES

Foresight for Citizens’ Participation: Tomorrowlands & Leveraged Play

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NGFP 2020 Fellow Tolullah Oni Is Growing A Project For Healthier Futures in Africa

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Using foresight to build food systems capacity

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Five Takeaways from the Dubai Future Forum

Five Takeaways from the Dubai Future Forum Twenty Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) attended one of the world’s most prominent futures and foresight conferences – the Dubai Future Forum – in November, thanks to a partnership between the School of International Futures

Messages from Youth to COP 37 – ten years from now

Messages from Youth to COP 37 – ten years from now By 2037, governments and decision makers must have taken responsibility, implemented the climate pledges and acted to protect all forms of life. Climate justice must be a reality, and

The importance of futures thinking for collaborative climate and energy futures

The importance of futures thinking for collaborative climate and energy futures By Fisayo Oyewale As a foresight practitioner, I am intrigued by how futures thinking is applied to specfic issues and the voices that go into imagining alternative futures in

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