This past March, the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) offered five scenarios for global development in 2040. Two months later, the OECD released three scenarios for the future of global cooperation in 2035. Curious development professionals and others who like to peer into the future are no doubt asking: How does each organization see the future? Are the scenarios similar, different, closely aligned or wildly divergent? 

The NIC’s main purpose was to inform the Biden Administration and policymakers throughout the government about looming security challenges facing the United States. The OECD scenarios focused primarily on the OECD’s role as a member-driven (the United States is a member) international organization navigating a shifting landscape for global collaboration and public policy. While the purpose behind generating the scenarios differed, both conducted widespread consultations outside their own organizations.

New Security Beat readers might expect similarities between the two sets of global scenarios, and they won’t be disappointed. Both scenario sets point to a more fragmented world where blocks of countries cluster together for economic and security reasons and vie alternatively for favors from the United States, China, and the European Union (EU). These isolated blocks evolve into separate cyber-sovereign enclaves with their own digital infrastructure that reshapes the civic space.

Other similarities between the two scenario sets acknowledge a new global landscape where the international order is brittle at best and where regional players and non-state actors exert disproportional power at will. Both global scenario sets highlight the reality that unresolved environmental issues (e.g., climate change) will continue to haunt the world while growing inequalities will likely deepen.

What sets the NIC and OECD scenarios starkly apart is the role of Beijing. The OECD scenarios focus revolve around private sector concerns, whereas the NIC scenarios (three out of five) point to the looming consequences of Beijing’s hefty military, ideological, economic, and technological achievements, including its pervasive and intrusive surveillance mechanisms.

NIC’s Global Scenarios for 2040

The NIC report begins by categorizing the “structural forces”—namely demographic, economic, environmental, and technological—that shape all their scenarios. Along with these forces, the report identifies five themes that also influence the scenarios:

1. Shared global challenges, like climate change threats, disease spread, financial calamities, and technological dislocation;
2. Fragmentation, characterized by increasing connectivity that yields greater interdependencies, which can paradoxically divide rather than unite societies;
3. Disequilibrium, which can come about as a result of a natural collision of the first two themes
4. Contestation, perhaps best thought of as a constant ebb and flow of wrangling within and among communities and states with resulting and inevitable, and sometimes irreparable, fractures; and,
5. Adaptation, in which the countries and societies that successfully thrive, rather than decline, do so based on their ability to adjust, change, and revamp their strategies and approaches, while maintaining internal cohesion. 

These structural forces and themes lay the groundwork for generating the NIC’s mostly self-descriptive global scenarios: Renaissance of Democracies, A World Adrift, Competitive Coexistence, Separate Silos, and Tragedy and Mobilization.

OECD’s Global Scenarios for 2035

The OECD scenarios work with six main drivers of change, each of which encompasses multiple areas of uncertainty that could shape the future of global collaboration. As most OECD members are among the strongest developed economies, “economics” features prominently as a powerful driver of change for their scenarios. What will the balance be between state policies and free market-led forces? Who will have access to the game-changing technologies and rare earth elements that underpin a green and digital economy?

A second powerful driver, according to the OECD report, are shifts in governance and ideology. Will more representative and open or more closed and authoritarian governments prove most effective in managing future crises and promoting well-being? The OECD also points to the rise in common risks to humanity as a key driver. How will countries respond to and mitigate the devastating effects of global warming, biodiversity loss, and deforestation, as well as emerging existential risks from technologies such as artificial intelligence and biological engineering? 

Digitalization is also high up on the “drivers of change” list, and its impacts interlink with the influence of non-state actors, as well as with shifting societal values. Will the gap between the connected and unconnected widen or shrink? Will the next waves of digital innovation further unite or divide the global community? Digital access could drive cross-border connection and global civic action, and accelerate new production technologies such as distributed manufacturing and 24/7 online skills training. On the other hand, the world could also see an ominous wave of heightened corporate power and/or state-based digital sovereignty that divides countries and communities, along with misinformation campaigns, restrictions on media/social media and intrusions on basic citizen privacy. 

With these key drivers and a few others in hand, the OECD generated three global scenarios. The first is a Multitrack World where division looms large and countries have cleaved into five mostly separate but parallel clusters, each revolving around its own “data infrastructure and digital ecosystem.”  In the Virtual Worlds scenario, as the name implies, there is a major shift away from physical encounters (classes, meetings, office interactions, personal trade and commercial interactions) to their virtual equivalents, combined with a push by citizens for greater and more sustained interconnectedness. The third OECD scenario, Vulnerable Worlds, is one in which international collaboration on climate is weak, and the private sector becomes the leader of an effective technology-based push to carbon neutrality, while at the same time allowing other destabilizing threats to mount.

Main Convergences

A Fragmented Future: Despite the differing objectives driving the scenarios of the OECD (global collaboration) and those of the NIC (threat assessment), several convergences exist between the two sets of scenarios. For instance, in the NIC’s Separate Silos scenario, the world is fragmented into several economic and security blocs of varying size and strength, centered on the United States, China, the European Union (EU), Russia, and a couple of regional powers. Under this scenario, each block is focused on self-sufficiency, resiliency and defense. Information flows within separate cyber-sovereign enclaves, supply chains are reoriented, and international trade is disrupted. The scenario is reminiscent of the OECD’s Multitrack World scenario under which different systems in different parts of the world have solidified, creating several parallel clusters of states. Each cluster has a separate digital infrastructure, and attitudes towards well-being such as inequality, freedom of expression, and surveillance are highly divergent between clusters. Large-scale movement away from globalization and distrust between clusters has led to diminished interest in and incentives for international trade and cooperation. 

Unrecognizable Civic Space: There is no mistaking the similarities about digital infrastructure, international trade, globalization, and cooperation in the NIC’s Separate Silos and the OECD’s Multitrack World scenarios. The two scenarios also present striking similarities with the civic space break apart scenario generated in the OECD’s Digital Transformation and the futures of civic space to 2030 foresight publication. In this scenario, civic space has broken into micro-spaces that vary in levels of openness and inclusiveness. Some spaces are nearing collapse or have collapsed. Others are thriving because stakeholders have adopted human rights-based tech principles as well as other measures necessary to protect and expand civic space. And other spaces are somewhere in-between, facing heavy restrictions but still managing to ward off a complete closure, through the use in part of civic technologies. 

Unfolding Power Vacuum: Similarities between the NIC’s A World Adrift scenario and the OECD’s Vulnerable World scenario also abound. In the former, the international system is volatile, with major powers (like Beijing), regional players, and non-state actors flouting international rules and institutions. Under this scenario, OECD countries are plagued by slower economic growth, widening societal divisions, and political paralysis. Beijing takes advantage of the West’s troubles to expand its international influence, especially in Asia. But Beijing still lacks the will to take on global leadership, leaving many global challenges, such as climate change and instability in developing countries, untackled. 

In the OECD’s Vulnerable World scenario, humanity is also at a precipice, but it got there differently. A lack of sustained action among national governments on climate change means that reliance on technological innovation, coming largely from the private sector, emerged as the primary route forward. While this has led to rapid progress on reducing emissions, failure to act holistically on environmental issues compromised critical ecosystem services, such as soil fertility and the provision of clean drinking water. Cascading crises are thus nearing. Extreme inequality and structural unemployment are also growing in many countries, as are digital manipulation and disinformation. With its focus on existential risk, it challenges the notion that future risks will be of the same scale and nature as past risks and that humanity can afford to muddle along. Similarities around environmental issues, inequalities, instability and failed governance between the NIC and OECD scenarios are uncanny.

Main Divergences

Dominating People’s Republic of China (PRC) Influence: While commonalities abound between the scenario sets from the NIC and the OECD, and accepting that looking over the horizon is never easy, a striking difference in the reports is around the role and influence of the PRC on future development scenarios. The OECD scenarios do not refer to specific countries, but when reading between the lines, it is clear that the PRC does play a more dominant role than any other state or set of global actors (i.e., companies and civil society).  The OECD scenarios are more concerned with the private sector as an increasingly powerful force in the international system and source of competition and potential disruption. In contrast, in three of the five NIC scenarios, the PRC’s military, ideological, economic, and technological achievements loom large.

PRC’s Growing Surveillance Regime: The OECD scenarios raise the issue of which direction and for what purposes certain surveillance and monitoring technologies might progress in the hands of less democratic regimes or privately held “net-states.” In fact, U.S. sources reveal that the PRC has already deployed massive surveillance on the Chinese people, built algorithms the government uses to track the comings and goings of China’s nearly 11 million Uyghurs, and has data-sharing agreements with local and provincial police, and other Chinese authorities, to monitor Uyghur movements. There is no doubt that use of the surveillance technologies for malign purposes are already being deployed with ever-increasing sophistication and reach, and likely more invasive in the future.

Free-Markets at Cliff’s Edge: Another difference—not unrelated to the future global role of the PRC—is the extent to which economic forces will be driven mostly by state policies or by free market-led forces. While there are several structural challenges ahead for Beijing’s GDP, like a slowdown in domestic growth, a declining youth population, and an uptick in labor costs, the PRC’s economic fortunes, while hard to predict, look promising out to 2035 and beyond. There is little question among economists and others who write about the country, that China is here to stay as an economic powerhouse, even while it faces challenges ahead. That said, scenarios that underplay the challenges to capitalism and free market-led economies by Beijing are possible, but much less plausible in the future. Growing evidence suggests that Beijing will continue to aggressively pursue its own brand of economic policies.

Focus on Existential Risk: Finally, the OECD scenarios clearly raise the issue of growing existential risks, or common threats to humanity that could destroy our long-term potential. In the Vulnerable Worlds scenario, companies and major powers compete fiercely to advance new technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI), without safeguarding against the risks associated with these technologies or ensuring a human-centered approach. In referring to humanity being at “a precipice,” the scenario is informed by long-term thinkers on this subject. While the NIC scenarios explore relatively familiar risks such as interstate conflict and supply chain disruption, the OECD scenarios point out that the challenges of the future could be of a nature that they require an unprecedented level of global cooperation to overcome.

Bottom Line 

The NIC and the OECD look into the future and what do they see? In short, lots of similarities like growing fragmentation, increased digitalization, and a gradual breakdown in international cooperation and trade. On the flip side, the NIC scenarios, unlike the OECD’s, spotlight growing and significant PRC challenges to world stability, while the OECD is more concerned with the power aggregating to the private sector and novel risks such as those from artificial intelligence. Could these differences be explained as artifacts of their varying approaches—global cooperation (OECD) versus threat analysis (NIC)? Regardless of the scenario-generating rationale, the many similarities and marked differences are worth taking note of by development professionals. 

Development practitioners might use these sets of global scenarios to consider:

• How might development cooperation structures evolve in a more divided world? How can individual countries prepare to navigate such changes?
• How could the conceptualization of human development change in a hyper-digital age? What new possibilities for empathy/solidarity could technologies like virtual reality create?
• How can development actors bring a longer term and more global risk-reduction lens into their work?
• To what degree should great power competition and other challenges like digitalization and advanced technologies inform country development strategies? 

Scenarios that explore futures of the international system can be instructive as development organizations look to develop and future-proof their strategies and portfolios to align with tomorrow’s new realities.