Planning from the future: an emerging agenda

In the foreseeable future, it is more than likely that the types, dimensions, and dynamics of crisis drivers will increase dramatically, in some instances exponentially. While a growing number of organizations with humanitarian roles and responsibilities sense that such changes are afoot, few have looked at how these might fundamentally affect not only what they do but also how they do it. This article suggests that it is time for humanitarian organizations to look far more systematically at the transformational factors that will increase disaster vulnerabilities around the world and also the opportunities that exist to mitigate them. The article notes that some of the most transformative factors affecting humanitarian action will be the result of new political structures in the post-Western hegemonic world and the growing political centrality of humanitarian crises. The consequences of these and other transformative factors mean that those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities will have to be far more anticipatory and adaptive than is the case today. They will have to pay far greater attention to innovation and * Dr Kent accepted his present post after completing his assignment as UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia in April 2002. Prior to his assignment in Somalia, he served as UNHumanitarian Coordinator in Kosovo (1999), UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Rwanda (1994–1995), Chief of the IASC’s Inter-Agency Support Unit (1992–1994), Chief of the UN Emergency Unit in Sudan (1989–1991), and Chief of Emergency Prevention and Preparedness in Ethiopia (1987–1989). Volume 93 Number 884 December 2011 doi:10.1017/S1816383112000331 939 innovative practices and significantly expand the ways in which and with whom they collaborate. Extrapolating lessons from the past will increasingly provide less guidance on how to deal with humanitarian futures. The types of humanitarian crisis driver are increasing exponentially, as are their dimensions and dynamics; furthermore, the systems, institutions, and assumptions that have emerged over the past two decades will not be adequate to meet the humanitarian challenges of the next two decades and beyond. Moreover, not only are the types, dimensions, and dynamics of crisis drivers significantly expanding, but at the same time the broader global context in which such crisis events take place is dramatically changing. It is the interplay between the changing nature of threats and the context in which they will increasingly play out that calls for a new humanitarian agenda – one underpinned by ‘planning from the future’.1 Conceptually, ‘planning from the future’ has its roots in a number of different disciplines –management, political science, new approaches to governance, and environmental management. What many of these areas share is an appreciation of insights from complexity theory. These insights suggest that reductionist analysis leading to top-down strategies, with finite objectives and predefined means for attaining them, is neither feasible nor desirable in a world in which ongoing economic and technological changes and increasing social complexities predominate. Nevertheless, in a number of cases, successful ‘planning from the future’ has emerged from adaptations of such conventional approaches. As Ramalingam has suggested in his analysis of successful vaccination programmes in the health sector: We can see a clear evolution from a prescriptive model, a broad formal, rational, design approach, which tried to ‘solve the puzzle’ . . . towards a learning, evolutionary, politically savvy approach, in which the context shaped the approach, and conscious effort was put into adapting the project as it progressed.2 ‘Planning from the future’, in other words, assumes that one cannot predict what will be, but that one can learn how better to deal with and navigate uncertainty and complexity. It also assumes that this is an approach that can and has been learned. Increasingly modern social and natural sciences assume that ‘most phenomena in the universe are somewhere in the middle [between randomness and deterministic]; they mix determinism and randomness in complex and 1 The phrase ‘planning from the future’, besides being the title of this article, is the motto of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London. It suggests an approach in which standard futures analysis, which normally depends upon trends analysis, is replaced by scenario analysis, which focuses upon the complex interplay of non-linear factors that in and of themselves do not necessarily reflect consistent patterns of behaviour. 2 Ben Ramalingam, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming 2012. R. C. Kent – Planning from the future: an emerging agenda