Highlight 37/2025: Future-Ready Governance: Why Strategic Foresight Matters?
Manjushka Savithri Gunathilaka, 3 September 2025
In an era characterized by Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty, and Ambiguity (TUNA), traditional governance models are proving to be increasingly inadequate. Escalating climate threats, economic shocks, health crises, and sociopolitical unrest challenge governments to operate in environments where the future is not merely unknown but unknowable.
Strategic foresight, the structured exploration of multiple plausible futures, has emerged as a critical tool for navigating these complexities. It equips institutions to anticipate emerging risks and craft resilient, adaptive responses through tools like scenario planning, horizon scanning, and policy gaming. Unlike predictive forecasting, foresight embraces uncertainty and helps build institutional capacity for long-term, inclusive, and forward-looking policymaking.
However, the benefits of foresight are maximized only when it is systematically institutionalized, embedded across government structures, supported by legal mandates, and linked to national planning, budgeting, and evaluation cycles. Globally, several countries have demonstrated the value of such institutionalization. Finland’s foresight ecosystem includes the Parliamentary Committee for the Future, which deliberates on long-term policy challenges, and the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, which conducts strategic foresight activities to inform national policy-making. Under the Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures leads whole-of-government foresight efforts through scenario exercises, officer secondments, and horizon scanning. Canada’s Policy Horizons conducts forward-looking research on complex policy challenges such as the future of work, climate resilience, and governance, linking foresight findings to inter-ministerial cooperation. Estonia, through its Foresight Act, has established the Parliamentary Foresight Centre to conduct scenario-based planning and to assess the implementation of previous foresight recommendations, ensuring learning loops for governance improvement.
This global trend is reinforced at the multilateral level. The United Nations’ Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future call for anticipatory governance to be mainstreamed across peace, development, and human rights domains. These frameworks highlight foresight’s role in shifting the international system from crisis-driven response to proactive risk prevention, aligning governance with broader goals of resilience, sustainability, and inclusiveness.
Sri Lanka offers a cautionary example of the consequences of weak anticipatory systems. The 2022 economic collapse, triggered by depleted foreign reserves, fuel shortages, and mass protests, was the result of prolonged short-termism, institutional fragility, and ignored warning signals. According to the International Monetary Fund (2023), pervasive corruption and fundamental governance weaknesses could imply severe long-term fiscal and economic risks. Although progress has been made in disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation initiatives, Sri Lanka lacks a formal mechanism to embed foresight systematically into its national governance and human rights protection systems.
Integrating foresight within Sri Lanka’s Department of National Planning, Parliamentary Oversight Committees, and the Central Bank could enable early detection of systemic vulnerabilities, from youth unemployment to climate-induced displacement, allowing for preventive, inclusive, and coherent policymaking.
Ultimately, in a world defined by TUNA dynamics, strategic foresight is not a luxury but a governance imperative. Institutionalizing foresight will allow states to transform uncertainty into opportunity, ensuring that governance systems are not only reactive but genuinely resilient, adaptive, and future-ready.
Manjushka Savithri Gunathilaka, Highlight 37/2025: Future-Ready Governance: Why Strategic Foresight Matters?, 3 September 2025, available at www.meig.ch
The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the authors and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.