I’m reading through papers, books and reports related to queerness, the environment, and occasionally other topics. As I read, I’m taking notes so I can refer back to my old readings and remember their key points more easily. Why not post my notes here, so you can all learn with me?

The bulk of the article will be a summary of the reading, and will then end with my thoughts. Square brackets throughout the summary indicate comments from me.

The formatting for this one is a bit shit because I started reading it before I had the idea to start posting these.

United Nations Development Programme. (2022). Polycrisis and Long-term Thinking: Reimagining Development in Asia and the Pacific Foresight Brief. United Nations. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2022-09/UNDP-RBAP-POLYCRISIS-AND-LONG-TERM-THINKING-2022.pdf

• We have issues with sytemic risks which are made by people.
  • Natural risks have a long history. We can analyse them across an extended period of time. We can follow a step by step, linear approache to deal with them. This is not so with systemic risks.
  • The first human made risks are relatively new.
    • Nuclear weapons, AI, biotechnology are all named.
  • There is no track record of surviving human-made existential risks. We have plenty of data on the mortality of natural risks, so we know what works and what doesn’t. Not so for the recent human-made ones. And we only get one shot; you don’t get a do over with an existential risk. Produce a hysteresis.
  • If they are not addressed now, they may become unmanageable in future. However, there is much more uncertainty now.
  • The local is no longer local, and the global is not just global. Risk analysis frameworks have to account for unknowable consequences elsewhere.
• The paper calls for polycrisis frameworks.
• Discusses feedback loops; talks about global heating, rising temps, dryer forests, forest fires releasing more carbon… And arctic sea ice melting, decreasing albedo, warming oceans and causing more ice to melt.
  • “Warmer weather expands the geographic range of disease-carrying mosquitoes, while increased incidences of flooding can impede access to clean drinking water and cause an uptick in waterborne diseases. Other human-driven trends amplify these effects. Increased urbanization results in more people living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions and greater human-animal contact, which create more opportunities for disease transmission.”
  • “The impact of factors such as climate change and pandemics can exacerbate poverty and inequality. Climate change-induced extreme weather causes a decline in crop yields, which harms household livelihoods and also has repercussions on the food supply, resulting in malnutrition and declining health. This has consequences for labour productivity and economic growth. Meanwhile, pandemics result in job losses, causing economic hardship for workers. Once pushed into poverty, people can become trapped within feedback loops that imprison them for generations: intergenerational poverty begets poor health and a lack of education, impacting people’s ability to work and further catapulting them into indigence as part of a vicious ‘cycle of poverty’.”
  • “Poverty and inequality in turn also increase climate change and pandemic risks. Lower-income countries may not have the luxury of curbing their greenhouse gas emissions, increasing global warming, while a lack of resources can result in poor sanitary conditions that trigger pandemic outbreaks. As poverty and inequality increase, so does the risk of conflict. Such conditions can fuel social unrest, including protests and riots as citizens demand change. Poverty and inequality can also lead to armed conflict between states, as countries must compete for scarcer resources, and some may engage in armed aggression to access them. Chronic conflict also contributes to poverty and inequality. Since climate change exacerbates a number of existing threats, including to security, it has been termed a ‘threat multiplier’.”
• Measures which are sustainable now could turn out to be unsustainable in future.
• Treating people and our economies as separate from nature creates a false binary that means we are likely to miss emergent phenomena and tipping points.
• “Long-term thinking can be thought of as an intentional consideration of what might happen in the future, the choices for influencing it and the consequences of those choices.”
  • Long-term thinking needs to be paired with long-term planning. A pandemic like COVID was predicted by experts, but it failed to translate into government action and practical preparedness at a macro level.
• “As problems we fail to address now continue to unfold over multiple lifespans, they will continue to increase in scale and complexity, eventually becoming unmanageable. Many decisions we arrive at today will have an impact for centuries.”
  • Greenhouse gases will eventually runaway.
  • Need to design AI systems with human values before we lose the ability to do so.
• May need to only make a small change to affect good long-term change; contrasted with small things that add up and amplify to cause a lot of bad things down the track.
  • Investments in prevention pay for themselves over time. It’s harder to stop something already in motion.
• If the future is:
  • Uncertain, then institutional long-term thinking could entail: adaptive programming mechanisms, guided by long-term visions and strategies that consider many future possibilities. 
  • Dynamic, then institutional long-term thinking could entail: learning-centric decision-making models, with shorter action-learning cycles to regularly test assumptions about the future and programmatic means of navigation.
  • Interconnected, then institutional long-term thinking could entail: research, knowledge and collaboration mechanisms that reduce organisational siloes, with accountability frameworks that incentivise joint, long-term outcomes.
• Embedding long-term thinking into political mandates and structures
  • Future generations’ advisors with veto power are powerful, but tend to get defunded. When they are in an advisory role, they tend to stick around more and are respected since they look more like enablers than blockers.
  • Enshrining the principle in law is effective. Should be broad so they don’t be constraining in future.
  • “Designing programmes as a collection of interconnected experiments towards a high-level vision, strategic intent, or a set of broad principles, as opposed to overly detailed outcomes, for instance, can provide more opportunity for iterative learning and programmatic adaption in pursuit of long-term goals.”
  • Well-being economies are good places to insert general long-term thinking principles.
• Applying long-term and anticipatory thinking to evolve planning and governance models
  • Have policymakers participate in the foresight work
  • Need long-term planning to embed long-term thinking. Strategic foresight is a useful entry point; particularly how to prioritise and invest in the resources to actualise goals.
  • Need future-fit governance systems
    • Anticipatory governance -Processes to build the supportive ecosystems and institutional muscles to
      realise the transformational effects of more forward-looking mindsets and methods for planning and
      programming
      • Core pillars
        • Foresight system
        • Pathways to integrate intelligence about the future into policies and implementation
        • Feedback system for assessing outcomes
        • Overall shift in culture and structures
      • Need shifts at the level of
        • Institutional processes
        • Infrastructure
        • Operational agility – Ability to change, given an uncertain future
        • Culture
        • Relationships
        • Mindsets
  • Start in contexts with a higher appetite for risk, or that have flexible mechanisms for funding or reactive changes as the landscape shifts
    • Regular reflections / adaptation points in the standard planning cycle.
    • Budgeting and resource allocation process.
    • Planning artifacts, including the rigidity of a planning document, policy or guideline.
    • Accountability mechanisms, including the formulation of indicators or theories of change
• Assessment methods to support long-term thi.nking in policies and programmes
  • Impact assessments allow you to think through what the consequences of proposed actions might be when there is still a chance to modify or even stop them
  • Framework for Assessing Intergenerational Fairness developed by the School of International Futures, in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
    • Is the impact of a policy over the long-term fair to current and future generations?
  • Understand the current decision-making ecosystem
    • What is the premise?
    • What is the evidence base being used?
    • What are the structures?
    • What are the incentives?
    • What grants legitimacy?
  • Discount rate – a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future
    • High discount rate favours the present
    • Want to lower the discount rate
    • Expand the discount rate to include social and ecological benefits
    • Combine with future impact assessment for a more holisitc cost-benefit analysis
• Supporting long-term thinking in the private sector
  • Corporations are set up in such a way that they are oriented towards the short-term. This leads them to discredit long-term effects.
  • They are an important channel of influence in the increasing the role they have in controlling infrastructure pertaining to democratic processes, such as social media.
  • We need to discourage companies from issuing short-term earnings guidance, and to require the ones that do to put that guidance in the context of their long-term strategy.
  • Introduce cumulative earnings reporting, so each quarter builds on the next.
  • Link executive pay to ESG targets.
  • Move away from GDP to things which account for other long-term measures.
    • This needs to happen structurally, so everyone is doing this at the same time; otherwise, businesses which move first will be unable to sustain themselves.
  • Prioritise human rights.
• Cross-disciplinary thinking
  • The need for cross-disciplinary thinking
    • Needed more now than it used to be as the world is more interconnected.
    • A policy that might achieve a good aim in one area (furthering economic development to reduce poverty) might be bad in another (increasing carbon emissions).
    • Feedback loops can be harnessed – doing a good thing in one area may also facilitate good things in other areas. This would be more efficient than tackling things individually.
  • How to foster greater cross-disciplinary thinking
    • Intentionally design development strategies based on interconnections, or understanding the nature of interconnectivity. E.g., co-financing initiatives that benefit multiple departments’ outcomes.
    • Get people out of silos and engaging with different expertise and ways of knowing.
    • Need to be able to work with intangible factors that influence behaviour (individual and institutional). Allow for greater risk appetite, deeper collaboration, and openness to thinking outside the box, while working within formalised boxes for decision making. Build relationships, trust and political will, as well as spaces for psychological safety and reflexivity on power dynamics. All so we can address barriers to collective thinking. “It is about technical expertise, tools for strategic foresight, or cross-disciplinary academic research and evidence.”
    • SDGs have helped with some cross-government forums. But we still need to consider the locus of power that dictates decision-making and the incentives to privilege certain information, or certain outcomes over others.
    • It’s useful to have tailored systems thinking tools which show interconnections across systems and also explicitly show the trade-offs or multiplier effects for intervention options.
    • Combine systems thinking with design practices to translate new thinking into action. This is “systemic design”. Makes it easier to experiment and expand learning about a system, including mapping leverage points; allows you to continuously intervene in a system and reflect on the results.
    • You may be able to support pathways for institutional reform and culture change by expanding systemic design capabilities within the institutes. This is particularly useful where it is impossible to engineer or even predict the outcomes of interventions for long-term goals. Bijl-Brouwer and Malcolm (2020) offer starting points for adapting the processes and focus of co-creation, decision-making and learning spaces to cultivate more systems-oriented modes of thinking and acting:
      • Opening up and acknowledging the interrelatedness of problems
      • Developing empathy with the system
      • Strengthening human relationships to enable learning and creativity
      • Influencing mental models to enable change
      • Adopting an evolutionary design approach
    • Should foster research that develops methods to manage interconnected risks across disciplines.
      • “One option is to move from the traditional risk assessment practice involving just two dimensions of risk – impact and likelihood – to a four- dimensional approach that also considers interconnectivity and velocity”.
      • “Another is the use of horizon scanning approaches as part of risk analyses in order to systematically scan for long-term drivers of risks and signals of change, and integrate their implications into the prioritization of risk mitigation measures”.
    • The introduction of new tools to support long-term approaches cannot happen in isolation. “They should be considered within broader efforts to transform governance structures in ways that create more space for anticipatory and adaptive decision-making.”
• Constraints of long-term thinking
  • The future is still, ultimately, always unknown.
  • The experiences and desires of future generations are possible to imagine but impossible to know.
  • Mindsets also play a key role in implementing long-term thinking, not just having the correct tools.
  • These tools and techniques could have different outcomes depending on the user’s intentions, or how they understand the outcomes. A poor use would be if people falsely presume a capacity to “predict what is unknowable, or to engineer what is complex and uncertain”.
  • Two overarching areas for further consideration and research relate to how to navigate the constraints of long-term thinking in relation to the following two points.
    • Establishing what people in the future will care about.
      • Governments already struggle to listen to the needs of people today. How do you do it for the future?
      • It is important to be transparent about the information and thought processes used to come to a decision, and when deciding what our shared values are. This becomes more true the more uncertainty there is. This is true of information and decisions made for people now and into the future.
      • Traditional frameworks are about money and the economy. As a result, being transparent around how shared values are decided upon is important. We need to shift towards talking about the price and value of human beings and thriving. Without this pricing, these risks will remain largely ignored.
    • Designing governance and risk frameworks optimised not only for future risk, but also future uncertainty.
      • Just as it is important to plan for things which might occur, we also need to plan for unknown unknowns.
      • Most governance is optimised for occurrences which can be known with some degree of predictability. They draw on patterns from the past, or projections of the future, and investments follow accordingly. As such, not many resources go into elucidating what could not be conceived of.
      • This means we have limited ability to respond to “the kinds of accelerating and increasingly unpredictable convergence of risks that create tipping points that are either completely new, or unpredictable in their scale or sites of influence”. Learning to respond to these unknowable risks requires thinking about innovative types of criteria and logistics.
      • An example of a framework is given.
        • “Demos Helsinki’s concept of “humble government,” being piloted by the Finnish Government, in which “policy-making begins with an acknowledgment of the prevailing uncertainty and is thus built as a continuously iterative process, in which actors are willing to (and allowed to) change their mind as new information arises.”

Appendix

• Appendix 1 contains a working draft of the UNDP RBAP Futures Impact Assessment. “The fundamental question that this futures impact assessment aims to answer is: Could this policy restrict choice or opportunity for the target population in the future?”
  • Lists questions you should be asking yourself on the substance of the policy, and also the process by which it has been developed.
• Appendix 2 has a number of lines of inquiry to be using throughout the entire decision-making process.

My Thoughts

This paper took me aaaaaaaages to read and I couldn’t read much at once. Something about the way it’s written befuddles me and has my brain turning in circles. That will also contribute to the article potentially being difficult to follow; that’s how I felt as I read!

I enjoyed that the paper pointed out that, while bad things can accumulate to become harder to manage in future, we can do something similar with good things. A small positive change now could bloom over months, years and centuries into something great. So, the sooner we start some things great or stop something terrible, the better.

I like the way things were laid out so clearly. I’m thinking of the bit where it explained how to undertake long-term thinking depending on if the future is uncertain, dynamic, or interconnected.

Pointing out that long-term thinking needs to be paired with long-term planning is important. It’s obvious once stated, but people and institutions don’t always follow through like they should. It’s not enough to know what’s happening, we also need to act. I will never miss an opportunity to remind everyone that the world has known about the climate crisis for decades, has taken decades to do anything about it, and is still under-delivering. The information was not enough, and it often isn’t; people need to do something with it.

The section on implementation was useful. It had practical advice like getting policymakers involved, moving towards a general vision rather than set outcomes, and embedding different elements of long-term principles in already extant documents.

Moving towards a vision rather than set goals was a good insight. It allows for flexibility as new information arrives about what is or isn’t working, or as priorities change, while still having a goal for everyone to be working towards.

Embedding the principles in already existing documents is useful as it means you’re not starting from the ground up. You’re just changing what’s already there to make it work better. And you can pick the principles that work best for that specific area. Do that to a bunch of different policies… And all of a sudden you’ve got long-term thinking and planning throughout the organisation.

I appreciated the list of ways the private sector could be improved. That’s something I often wonder how to tackle, so seeing that laid out was helpful to me. This is frustrating to write, to me, because people should just… be aiming to improve, and businesses are not monoliths; they have people at their heads, making conscious decisions to fuck other people over. In the absence of a business community that gives a shit, this is a useful set of principles.