You may recall that in our December newsletter, we flagged a project called, Towards an International Architecture for Managing Global Threats which we are doing with the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, supported by King’s College, London.
For this project, we interviewed approximately 40 experts from a wide range of disciplines to identify plausible future humanitarian threats, the capacities of present global systems to deal with them, types of innovations and innovative practices that could enhance systems capacities and the sorts of systems that will be required to deal with the future threats that the experts identified.
Towards the end of the year, we brought together a further set of experts in three working groups to see how they responded to the results of those interviews. Similar to the individual interviews, the three working groups explored
- The types and nature of global threats in the foreseeable future;
- The extent to which existing global systems offer lessons-learned about ways to deal with such threats;
- The types of global systems that should be considered for dealing with global threats in the future.
There were some very interesting departures when it came to the sorts of future crises that we have to be sensitive to in the future. Take a look at the Working Groups Summary, and see how significant you think those differences are.
Two more working groups will be launched towards the end of March, mainly comprising experts from the Far East, South Asia and South America – and again, we shall pass on the findings towards the end of April.
Lastly, we intend to hold two Futures Roundtables in May in which policy planners and decision-makers will come together for two reasons. The first is to see to what extent the sorts of findings and conclusions from the working groups resonate with Futures Roundtable participants; and, the second is to gain insights about how those participants identify and address complex problems.
What will be the dynamics that lead those policy planners and decision-makers to accept, reject or modify the findings and conclusions of the experts?
We would like to keep you informed about how the project is developing. Do let us know if that would be of interest.
In the meantime, you might also be interested to see the sorts of systems that are emerging as the most frequently discussed for managing global threats. Here, too, do let us know if there’s something that you feel should be added.
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