Not since COVID-19 burst onto the scene a few months ago have so many individuals and institutions, outside the business, military, and intelligence communities, woken up to the need for a smart way to characterize and communicate uncertainty. The overwhelming choice for many is scenario planning. Today, scenario planning applies to a wide spectrum of issues, not just international development. It has been used to anticipate changes in higher education, rethink workforce composition, and explore options for individual financial planning.  

Scenarios are frequently being espoused in catchy terms other than simply “best case” and “worst case” to include: “China First”, “Muted World Recovery”, and “Winter Lockdown” phrased scenarios. Yet, the plethora of development-focused pandemic scenarios falls roughly into two clusters with inevitable overlaps.  

Today’s Fast-Track Scenarios

The first cluster revolves around more immediate responses. They typically focus on what aid organizations should do now to save lives. These scenarios are decidedly more operational and tactical. They look at how to redirect existing assets to where the health needs are greatest, determine how much new funding should go to areas of high pandemic need, and examine the extent to which healthcare facilities need to quickly increase laboratory testing and promote disease surveillance. These scenarios recognize that aid organizations must depend even more on country-led and NGO-administered humanitarian assistance. 

For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S Department of State originally increased their COVID-19 assistance budgets to more than $1 billion dollars to maintain essential healthcare operations in more than 100 countries; run risk communication and community-engagement programs; and provide safe water, sanitation and hygiene resources, and emergency food assistance. The U.S. Congress has appropriated more than $9.2 billion in 2020 for additional global health programs, and nearly $7.5 billion for global economic and development assistance in response to COVID-19. More detailed information is available here. 

The U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) recently pledged $941 million dollars to support essential research into vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments in response to COVID-19. And it committed to review all existing overseas activities that can be modified or scaled up, such as health systems strengthening and humanitarian assistance relief, along with beefed-up support for NGO operators. A long list of other institutions such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, in addition to UN agencies such as UNHCR, UNICEF, and UN Habitat, are also fast tracking aid delivery and shoring up fragile healthcare infrastructure in developing countries.

More funding is likely from aid organizations and governments with many programs targeting more immediate health delivery provisions, healthcare system strengthening, and speedy humanitarian assistance. 

Broader, Longer-term Scenarios

As the focus shifts to COVID-19’s secondary impacts, a second cluster has appeared where scenarios explore not just the health consequences but the economic, social, and political ones. These scenarios also stretch beyond 2020, and many protect livelihoods. A few scenarios look at the unique dynamics of COVID-19 impacts inherent to developing countries where, for example, the informal economy can represent upwards of 50 percent of total employment or the economy depends heavily on remittance flows from developed countries. 

The World Bank’s recent COVID-19 forecasts for 2021 portray three growth-oriented scenarios: the “Base, Downside, and Upside Scenarios.” The Base envisions that the global economy will fall precipitously, leading to a worldwide recession with global trade nose-diving, and those economies that depend on global value chains and tourism from abroad would suffer the greatest hits. The Downside Scenario assumes that COVID-19 infection rates, despite control measures, will flare up and businesses will contract even further. Compared to the Base scenario, consumption would remain low or drop further, and harmful cross-border spillover effects are amplified. In the Upside Scenario, the pandemic subsides as effective health measures remain in force. As lockdowns slowly ease, businesses reopen, and trade begins to flourish. Recovery is in sight, but not until 2021.

Using a much longer time horizon, and going well beyond the pandemic’s economic consequences to include political and international relations, the Atlantic Council proposes three scenarios: “The Great Accelerator Downwards, China First, and the New Renaissance.” The first depicts a world struggling to recover from the COVID-induced economic calamity, where the United States and China are still at odds on the pandemic’s origins, the U.S.-China trade war heats up further, and disunity wreaks havoc in the Eurozone. In the developing world, the predicted dire disease mortality numbers never fully surface, but economic growth stagnates. Poverty levels rise, erasing the gains of the past decade, as the world moves toward diminishing interdependence and a decline in economic trade between countries.  

In the China First scenario, the China strengthens its world grip and marches onward with strings-attached loans for its Belt and Road Initiative, winning new allies. In the New Renaissance scenario, the United States slowly regains its global economic grip as a U.S.-led international economic recovery finally takes root. Vaccines against COVID-19 become a reality, calls for greater global cooperation to find shared solutions to the next pandemic abound, and efforts (for now) to create a détente between China and the United States are mostly successful. With renewed confidence and growing big power consensus, aid organizations can return to programs that successfully boost economic growth, reduce poverty, and improve the quality of life for those in the developing world.

The Wilson Center has also generated an impressive number of COVID-19 induced, forward-looking perspectives, or as they call them, “Things to Watch” on development issues. These scenario-like possible futures are conveniently anchored in countries (including Brazil, China, Mexico), by regions (including Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East) and across key themes (including science, technology, and environment). The spectrum of plausible pandemic-linked outcomes is broad. Some outcomes are straightforward ones, like COVID-19’s consequences on trade, national security, and health. Others are much more granular takes on the pandemic’s impacts on peacekeeping, extremism, deforestation, gender inequality, and cybersecurity.

Will Scenario Planning for Development Outlive COVID-19?  

There is no question that the pandemic has catapulted scenario planning for development into the mainstream for now. Many aid agencies have quickly established COVID-19 task forces and placed senior figures at their helm including the U.S., while other countries, like the UK, formed a distinguished consortium of government, academia, and industry leaders to develop and mass-produce vaccines. These efforts go a long way to address the pandemic by providing health recommendations such as social distancing, hand washing, and telemedicine to save lives combined with rapid economic relief to resurrect jobs and livelihoods lost to the pandemic. 

Yet as the pandemic becomes less acute, task forces will likely wind down and the impetus for scenario planning for development may lose steam. How will we stay ahead of the curve to address the next major disruptive event?  I previously highlighted seven headwinds that are slowing efforts to make scenario planning more prominent in aid organizations. Many of those institutional constraints, unfortunately, persist. Perhaps COVID-19’s rapid spread, the magnitude of lives lost, the severe economic displacement, devastating social upheaval, and its geographic reach across continents and within countries, will collectively make scenario planning an essential function to minimize the next global threat(s) we face.