Exploring preferred futures for development research

The global development landscape is shifting in dramatic ways, with new threats emerging as old problems persist. The world is falling short of its targets for health, food security and education, as climate change threatens hard-won gains. A culture of misinformation, disinformation and anti-evidence is growing. And while vulnerable populations still lack access to digital technologies, disruptive technologies are changing the world.

To better prepare for the challenges ahead, IDRC has supported an ambitious initiative drawing on strategic foresight and complexity theory to reimagine how development research is funded, conducted and leveraged for impact.

Research for development has long delivered evidence to improve lives around the world. However, today’s reality requires more than incremental progress. Research and research systems must now overcome outmoded approaches and structural inequalities, and live up to their transformative potential. 

Planners and funders urgently need to find new and more collaborative ways to support development research. Focused on Africa, the multi-pronged foresight project has provided researchers and stakeholders with a broad array of options to help them steer toward desirable futures.

“We cannot go on with business as usual and need to address the real challenges and contextual realities of people who do research in Africa,” said Rika Preiser, joint holder with Tanja Hichert of the UNESCO Chair in Complex Systems and Transformative African Futures at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Based at the university’s Centre for Sustainability Transitions, they are experts, respectively, in complex systems research and foresight practices, and co-leads for the IDRC-supported foresight research.

Open, equitable, capable and connected

The team of research-for-development experts and foresight practitioners used research and strategic foresight tools — such as domain mapping, horizon scanning and visioning exercises — to assist researchers, institutions and donors to be better prepared for the long-term. 

Led by Fiona Marshall at the University of Sussex Science Policy Research Unit in the UK, a foresight framing exercise mapped the current research-for-development landscape, illuminating key challenges and opportunities, ideas and debates in the field, as well as progress being made toward transformative change. 

The exercise identified persistent challenges, such as Northern-centric framing of development problems, barriers to research uptake in policy and practice, and biases that constrain capabilities and disincentivize career paths in the Global South. Among other changes, development research systems need to:

• decolonize minds and practices and embrace open access and creativity
• remove barriers to entry and access and meaningfully diversify the field
• break down siloes and invest in transdisciplinary careers and capabilities 
• boost research funding flows to Global South universities, think tanks and centres of learning
• find better ways of sharing research insights to increase uptake for development impact 

 The researchers proposed positive attributes of transformative research-for-development systems: open, equitable, capable and connected. They distilled these and other ideas in a summary diagram.

Disruptors and enablers

The team also conducted horizon scanning to surface the forces shaping or likely to influence the operating environment for research for development. Hundreds of “hits” collected in an interactive database helped inform responses to the key research question: What are the major disruptors and enablers creating risks or opportunities in this field and in research-for-development partnerships in the next 10 to 15 years? 

In imagining desirable futures for development research and the world, the researchers pinpointed major disruptors liable to bring unwelcome surprises and derail best-laid plans, as well as enablers offering sources of inspiration and hope. 

The top five disruptors were:

• a retreat from a rules-based global system
• an epidemic of misinformation
• excessive concentration of economic power
• climate-forced migration and displacement
• ineffective governance of frontier tech (e.g., generative artificial intelligence, gene tech, geo-engineering)

The top five enablers were:

• mainstreaming systems thinking and complexity science
• favouring social innovation alongside technological innovation 
• a paradigm shift to “planetary politics” to tackle global challenges
• reforming international development architecture
• developing new economic model(s) that replace neo-liberalism

Developing the futures we want

During a forum at Stellenbosch University with leading research-for-development actors, visioning exercises helped to imagine alternative futures and systems-level change.

Strategic foresight involves structured ways of envisioning plausible futures and pathways for change by challenging assumptions and anticipating potential risks, shocks and opportunities. The Three Horizons Framework used at the forum, for example, maps systems to work out what a preferred future might look like and where leverage points may exist to change entrenched systems. 

“Essentially, one juxtaposes what the research-for-development system looks like now; what we would like it to look like — that’s the third horizon; and what we might do to help change happen — the second horizon,” Hichert said in a short video on the forum. In trying their hand at what she called “systematic and structured futuring,” participants drew on their own experience in research-for-development systems as well as insights from the robust database of horizon-scanning hits developed earlier. 

Reflecting on the visioning exercise, participant Dorothy Ngila, director of strategic partnerships at South Africa’s National Research Foundation, said: “We are really engaged in making sure that the research funding environment is more co-designed and that we are opening it up.” And through intensive group discussions and activities, said Peggy Oti-Boateng, executive director of the African Academy of Sciences, “we really developed the future we want.”

From options to strategies

“The Three Horizon method works with weak signals that enable us to see little signs or ‘pockets’ of the future in the present that might lead to pathways to a preferred future, and culminates in producing strategic options,” Hichert said. When working with the future, it’s also critical to recognize what’s worth preserving, she noted. “Pockets of the past are equally important, because as systems change fundamentally, you could lose things that are really precious now.”

The foresight framing and horizon scanning provided valuable inputs to the strategic foresight exercise, which had the ultimate goal of producing a set of strategic options. The Stellenbosch Forum report, available on the project website, contains the wide-ranging collection of options, clustered by theme, that the project leaders believe could assist and inspire stakeholders in creating the future they want. Ideas include launching a community of learning and practice to help shift systems toward transformative research for development.

“Strategic options are literally that — some of the things that can be done, either immediately or over the longer term, to move toward a preferred future and mitigate against less desirable ones,” Hichert said. “Options can also serve as contingency plans, and options that are turned into measurable actions and objectives in essence become the strategy going forward.”

“There isn’t one single ‘solution’ or ‘best’ pathway to a preferred future,” Hichert added, “but many pathways dependent on context, stakeholders, agency, resources and perspective.” 

Strategic foresight and complexity theory can help research actors and systems journey towards preferred futures where their contributions to positive development change correspond to their ambitions.

Contributors: Fraser Reilly-King, senior analyst, and Colleen Duggan, team leader, IDRC; Tanja Hichert and Rika Preiser, UNESCO co-chairs in Complex Systems and Transformative African Futures, Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Fiona Marshall, professor of environment and development, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

Dive deeper into strategic foresight and how to think differently about the future on our dedicated web page.