The world needs strategic foresight now more than ever, and not just because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Mounting climate crises across the globe underscore the need—blistering “heat domes” and extensive wildfires across the parched United States West, catastrophic floods of unprecedented scale in Germany and Europe, and more rain in just twenty-four hours in Zhengzhou China than typically falls over the course of an entire year. Scientists warn that for the first time, deforestation now threatens the capacity of the Amazon forest to absorb carbon dioxide. Foresight is no longer a luxury and climate change is no longer a distant threat.

At a recent OECD-Development Assistance Committee (DAC) meeting of global foresight practitioners, co-chaired by the governments of the United States and Switzerland, the four plausible development cooperation strategies that emerged shared a common message: development cooperation as practiced today is unlikely to prevail in the near future. The decades-long status quo will be eclipsed by new approaches, new players, and a plausible new architecture creating opportunities, but will also rattle many well-established donor approaches.

OECD-DAC Friends of Foresight Community

The global development community is at a historic turning point with the COVID-19 recovery, investing trillions in both developing and developed countries in ways that will shape the world for decades to come. At the OECD-DAC meeting, more than 90 foresight practitioners from 42 countries, international and civil society organizations, think tanks, and global foresight experts explored the future of development cooperation under the leadership of OECD’s Development Cooperation Directorate (DCD). Topics such as the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in boosting productivity, the ever-expanding role of the People’s Republic of China, and the increasing importance of digital sovereignty were front and center. The role of anticipatory innovation to strengthen governance, counter authoritarianism, and shore up fragile democracies took a front row seat.  Foresight for peacebuilding, hardly a stranger to New Security Beat readers, also garnered serious workshop discussion. Four exploratory scenarios, to examine a range of development cooperation, emerged.

Signs, Signals and Emerging Development Cooperation Scenarios

As with many previous devastating disruptions in the development space, the COVID-19 global health emergency and its resulting socioeconomic crisis highlights the need for improved signals monitoring by foresight units and other entities seeking to avoid calamities and optimize opportunities. Signals of change—both dire warnings and positive possibilities—allow countries and multilateral organizations to mitigate and seize them, respectively, in their earliest stages. For those new to foresight, signals are the precursors of change. They serve as a signpost or early trend that a significant emerging issue, like digitalization, is gaining both momentum and traction. These signals, often weak or fleeting at first, are typically uncovered in the foresight process of horizon scanning whereby signs of potentially important developments, both threat and opportunities, are systematically examined. Scanning the horizon often uncovers signs that are at the margins of current thinking.

Scenario 1: Digitalization Dominates

In the first scenario developed by the workshop attendees, digitalization rules. Those countries with greater access to the Internet, that have learned to master digital applications, skills and platforms, are significantly more likely to accelerate their economic growth. For those counties just maintaining their digital status quo—many in Africa—this means a loss of decades of catching up to a world that is increasingly more digitalized and interconnected. Digitalized countries are better positioned to respond to their citizens’ needs, help minimize the consequences of natural disasters and health crises, and to provide next generation citizens with good jobs.

The underlying sing and signals supporting this scenario include: (1) innovations, such as public-private partnerships between development cooperation providers and tech-based data-driven start-ups, respond to the needs of local populations; (2) an increased emphasis on bridging the existing gender digital gap; (3) addressing the gender and racial bias in AI; (4) seeing the current COVID-19 health crisis as a rehearsal for the climate crisis; and (5), moving to have risk-informed development cooperation as a standard practice.

Scenario 2: Power Dynamics Yield New Players

In the second scenario, other players take center stage as the existing development cooperation power structure declines. Several discrete signs and signals emerged to generate this scenario. The global economy shifts before our eyes with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becoming a dominant player in the global political and economic landscape with the Belt and Road and Digital Silk Road Initiatives. The latter provides countries with telecommunications upgrades, citizen surveillance technologies, and an array of e-commerce goodies.

Russia continues to spread its geopolitical influence by investing in infrastructure projects in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and even in Europe.

The Sino-Russian partnership strengthens and challenges Western norms and values, and at the same time the Global South’s power leadership rises and exerts a strong influence with countries like Turkey using development cooperation as an integral tool of its foreign policy.

The African middle class partially collapses and poverty skyrockets, erasing much of the progress made in human development from 2014 to 2020, and the polarization of Latin American societies accelerates, resulting in anti-establishment politicians growing stronger and young citizens begin voicing their concerns about intergenerational fairness.

Scenario 3: Locally-Led Cooperation Springs Up

Under this third scenario, development cooperation is driven by local and regional sources, not countries or groups of countries, as before. Over the past 60 years, sovereign countries working in unison have played an outsized role in development assistance cooperation under the OECD-DAC banner with some 30 countries leading the way. The United States, for example, one the founding members, is also the largest contributor. Australia, France, Canada, Japan, and Germany are also major and long-time contributors. OECD membership is expanding, with the inclusion of countries like Colombia (2020) and Costa Rica (2021). The fact remains, however, that over the last 60 years, global development cooperation and the OECD have become synonymous. A plausible alternative to complement this country-based coalition approach is one that is locally or regionally based.

In horizon scanning, a number of signs and signals emerged to generate this scenario: (1) global trade nose-dives; (2) globalization makes way for strong regionalization; (3) the U.S.-China trade dispute and other frictions accelerate this globalization-regionalization shift; (4) autonomous bioregions in food and energy emerge; (5) localization sharply increases; (6) locally-led, not donor initiated, development takes hold; (7) civil society organizations from the Global South rise in sync; (8) the Grand Bargain, an agreement between some of the largest donors and humanitarian organizations committed to “get more means into the hands of the people in need,” gains greater pre-eminence; (9) state ownership of the means of production rises; (10) production stays mainly at home; (11) remittance flows from abroad dwindle; and 12) blockchain partially helps offset the drop in remittances by drastically reducing the cost of cross-border transactions.

Scenario 4: New Cooperation Architecture Takes Shape

In the first three development cooperation strategies, remnants of the present approach are discernable but much less pronounced. They can exist, but only in the background. Digitalization (Scenario 1) as a development cooperation “NorthStar” can occur within the present approach, and new players (Scenario 2), like the PRC, can ascend pushing aside other countries and organizations but without totally dismantling the current cooperation model. Similarly, local and regional players (Scenario 3) can exert a new and powerful force that competes with or complements the current cooperation approach.

In Scenario 4, however, driving forces just barely on the horizon, like demands for reparations, move closer to center stage and citizens across developing countries band together to totally reject the “top-down” and long-standing traditional approaches of bilateral donors, foundations, multilateral organizations, and international non-profit organizations. This scenario demands that the current power structure be replaced and its bureaucratic machinery, now woefully outdated, be recast to better serve and partner with aid recipients and not perpetuate the status quo.

In this final development cooperation scenario, the present cooperation model is completely upended as past players, clumsy and inefficient bureaucracies, and well-trodden approaches quickly fade and a brand new aid dynamic takes shape. In short, the current structure of development financing is rejected.

Seven signs and signals are driving this scenario: (1) a growing number of Global South voices question the existing global development structure; (2) the call for reparations from colonial powers grows louder; (3) the movement #ShiftThePower gains traction; (4) philanthropy actively begins to support social movements; (5) the concept of humanitarianism gains further traction; (6) the concept of Global Public Investment (GPI) grows; (7) and, more countries deploy advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil their citizens.

Futures Thinking

An upswing in organizations like the OECD-DAC leading rigorous foresight exercises, with a wide range of stakeholders, is a welcome addition to international development where the global future is increasingly more complex, more uncertain, and more fast-paced than ever before. As we have all learned, the consequences of focusing only on today’s headlining issues is becoming increasingly perilous. The future of development cooperation five and ten years out is agreeably still somewhat cloudy but laying out plausible scenarios invites all stakeholders to take actions now.