The recently released National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040 report, clocking in at over 140 pages, is titled “A More Contested World.” That headline should come as no surprise to development professionals. The report, reviewed by the incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, before being sent to President Biden and Congress, examines key trends that will likely influence U.S. national security out to 2040. I blogged on the Global Trends Report back in 2015, when it was on the verge of being unveiled at the splashy South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin. This year’s public release was much more muted and the overall outlook decidedly more bleak, chaotic, and turbulent, not just from the lingering fallout of a “long tail” COVID-19 pandemic, but from the ominous environmental consequences of climate change on everything from glaciers and rising sea levels, to more frequent and intense tropical storms, and an unprecedented numbers of wildfires, like those seen last year in the Western United States. The NIC report also speaks to the ominous societal changes coming our way, best characterized by a widening chasm between what governments can reliably deliver and what citizens can reasonably expect.

Structural Forces:

The report identifies four trends or “structural forces” at work, namely demographic, economic, environmental, and technological that will anchor almost everything else in its forecast. These factors were selected because they are at the heart of assessing any future world and because projections about these forces are based on historical data. This in turn means that we can have a reasonable degree of confidence in how they will play out over time. Having described these structural forces, and peeked at their longer-term trajectories, the report takes a more dynamic look at how they interact with other “factors” to influence individuals, society, states, and the wider international system. The level of uncertainty begins to rise for this second report section, as you might expect, as projections and their complex interactions are less dependent on historical data and more conditioned on the interplay among the factors and speculative human choices.

Recurrent Themes:

Throughout the report, the authors emphasize four themes that are at play and feed off one another. The first, shared global challenges, includes widespread climate change threats, the spread of disease, sudden and acute financial crises, and inevitable technology disruptions. Left unchecked, these threats can accelerate existing food and water insecurity in poor countries, drive increased migration, undercut health provision, and hasten biodiversity loss. New technologies will almost certainly disrupt jobs, re-configure the workplace, and challenge traditional means of income generation.

The second recurrent theme is fragmentation in which increasing connectivity leads to greater dependencies which can backfire on society and actually divide and fragment people into like-minded silos and rally citizens around national, cultural, or political flagpoles. Disequilibrium, the third theme, refers to the natural collision of the first two themes in which existing systems and structures begin to falter, crumble, and ultimately fail, traditional rules and norms are upended, and people scramble to build a new order.

All of this leads to the fourth theme, contestation, best thought of as a constant ebb and flow of disputation, argumentation, and wrangling within communities and states with resulting fractures. On the international stage, contestation leads to unhealthy competition, unparalleled geopolitical strains, and states and countries charging ahead without rules to exploit advantages and fill vacuums.

The final and perhaps most telling theme revolves around adaptation, in which countries and societies either thrive or decline based on their ability to adjust, change, revamp, or remodel their strategies and approaches in every domain, from climate, migration, and jobs, to trade flows and technological innovations. How countries adapt to underlying demographic shifts, such as the “grey bulge” in key developed countries, may seriously constrain economic growth without creative and widely adopting innovations like AI. That the United States just reported its birth rate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and just released data showing China’s population grew at its slowest rate since the 1950s,may be a harbinger of what’s to come. How countries deal with the growing concentration of their citizens in cities and how well, in turn, these cities can provide essential services will be an adaptation key. For Asia, I blogged on these urban challenges in 2015, noting that proactive efforts to address urbanization were then in short supply. Adaptation overall, according to the report, will be most successful in those countries that build and sustain trust across public and private sectors.

Emerging Scenarios:

The report’s final section concludes with five scenarios or vignettes for how these forces, the factors driving them, and the recurrent themes are likely to play out to 2040. Not surprisingly, three of the scenarios pivot around U.S.-China competition in the years ahead, namely, the “Renaissance of Democracies”, “A World Adrift”, and “Competitive Coexistence.” For those new to scenario generation, catchy titles are a quintessential requisite that allows the reader to move beyond data to see a distinct non-overlapping picture from scenario to scenario. The two remaining scenarios, neither tethered to how China and the U.S. grapple with looming world problems, are called “Separate Silos” and “Tragedy and Mobilization.” These scenarios stem from a range of what the report refers to as global discontinuities that propel the U.S. and China to focus most of their energies on other pressing problems like the disintegration of global supply chains…not on their ongoing rivalries per se.

Five Development Consequences:

There are five consequences that development actors should be particularly attuned to:

• Crested Progress: Many of the hard-won gains over the past two decades to spur economic growth and prosperity, advance the quality of life, and support democratic processes for those in the developing world are at peril.
• Shifting Demographics: Global population growth slows down as the world begins to age. Regional growth differences, economic disparities, and the disputes and conflicts they engender, including mass migration, will be more pronounced and require more targeted aid approaches.
• Environmental Downslide: Climate change and the resulting degradation will land squarely on the backs of developing world countries, creating greater hardships, undermining, or even reversing economic gains, and creating new development challenges while making old ones more acute.
• Weakened Institutions: Trust in institutions from governments to civil society organizations will wane, growing skepticism that institutions can meet pressing needs, and consensus for collective action dries up. This “trust gap” is heightened by misinformation campaigns, tightened media control, and citizens flocking to associate only with like-minded ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. These societal trends will likely fuel a rise in nationalistic sentiment, undercutting political human rights, rule of law, and democratic institutions.
• Unrelenting Competition: Rivalry between China and the United States continues to rise as global international norms nose-dive, multilateral institutions lose their sway as cooperation dwindles, stronger regional players emerge, and non-state actors gain wider influence. China will continue to expand its international influence and offer an alternative vision for a new international order. In this growing global uncertainty and dominant power competition age, increased conflict and volatility are likely by-products that will undermine civic stability and pose risks to democracy.

While 2040 is some years out, development agencies and their partners, along with multilateral institutions and governments, are not sitting idly. President Biden recently held a meeting of 40 world leaders to rally them to redouble their efforts to avoid a worsening climate crisis. The World Bank just pledged a 35 percent increase in climate financing over the next five years to further address this challenge. On building and sustaining institutional trust, the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation is exploring new paradigms to upgrade how governments improve their responsiveness to citizens’ needs as a way to further strengthen fragile democracies. And, using horizon scanning techniques, UNDP is reviewing emerging governance approaches to better understand upcoming challenges and how countries can recalibrate their efforts to build more lasting trust. Other global challenges outlined in the NIC report, like emerging disruptive technologies, the growing rivalry between China and the US, and mass migration, will require a major rethink of current development approaches. Assuredly, those assessments are already underway.