Now more than ever, for civil society organisations, futures thinking is pivotal to shift the mindset from reacting to crises toward anticipating change and shaping outcomes. In an increasingly polarised world, futures thinking enables organisations to identify emerging trends, understand disruptions, and outline strategies that help them adapt to multiple futures.
We recently launched the report The Futures of Localisation: Scenarios for Civil Society in 2046, which builds on a year of research, consultations and workshops across Africa, Latin America and Europe and combines foresight methods and participatory, intersectional insights.
The aim of this exercise was not to predict the future but to prepare civil society organisations for uncertainty and offer tools and actionable recommendations for exploration. Exploring these questions in fact helps leaders develop sustainable strategies that re-embrace complexity and provide a space to address intangible dimensions and change.
The report aims to support civil society actors by exploring opportunities and challenges that might otherwise be overlooked, by exploring contrasting but plausible futures. By mapping trends and surfacing critical uncertainties, we developed four scenarios that captured how localisation might evolve, using power and resourcing as dimensions of analysis. The scenarios crucially highlighted that transformation cannot occur without shared responsibility across the civil society ecosystem.
By analysing implications of futures for ICSOs, local actors, and communities, we highlighted risks, opportunities, and trade-offs, to support strategic dialogue. Climate change, digital transformation, and South–South collaboration and local philanthropy emerged as cross-cutting themes that will shape the civil society landscape in 20 years.
Furthermore, the research highlighted that across the civil society ecosystem, trust, equity, and humility must be the principles that guide partnerships. The progress achieved so far to embed equity, address power dynamics, and localise is encouraging, but incremental reforms alone will not suffice, as strategic collaboration is needed to dismantle outdated systems that were no longer fit for purpose and build radically different ones.
During the launch of the report, participants discussed and reflected on which of the four scenarios presented in the report were most likely to materialise and the concrete actions that can be taken today to help realise the more positive scenarios. Amongst the contributions, participants highlighted the following actions to prepare for the scenarios outlined in the report:
- Enhancing connections and relationship-building in systems change around community leadership and local philanthropy
- Investing in digital social movement building and diversifying technology and funding
- Improving grassroots planning and funding initiatives that promote community voice, autonomy & resilience
- Proactively resourcing locally and generalising overhead funding to national CSO partners
- Advancing localised models of research and development
- Ceding space and building alliances with local leadership
Amidst disruptions, international civil society organisations exploring preferred futures can challenge themselves to rethink their future roles and strategise about the steps needed to move towards the visions that their mandates want to achieve. Futures thinking as a discipline does not eliminate uncertainty, but it can help organisations systematically navigate volatility. This encourages strategic thinking and future-proof decision-making to better react to and anticipate challenges and shocks through trends and signal scanning.
The report contributors indicated that most civil society organisations still struggle with prioritising futures thinking and fostering buy-in from leadership, despite recognising the value of the discipline. Strategic foresight and futures thinking empower organisations to move from simply responding to the world as it changes to actively shaping the futures they want to see. To this end, (I)CSOs should invest in building futures thinking capacity and anticipatory action mechanisms across all levels, from strategy to governance and operations.
For civil society actors to truly shape their own futures, embedding futures thinking into everyday practice is of the utmost importance. Only through the institutionalisation of futures can civil society organisations become proactive, meaningfully lead by example, and thrive.
This year, we will continue building on the insights gathered through our consultations on trends and signals for localisation and power shift. We will produce a Localisation Digest, an online compendium providing high-level insights into localisation models through trend mapping. The publication will comprise strategic foresight tools and resources as well as nascent insights on power shift and localisation from (I)CSOs, local organisations and donors, and the impact of the changing ecosystems on their work. To engage with our strategic foresight and futures thinking work, learn more about the Scanning the Horizon initiative.
