defined as an effort to gain a better understanding of the world, this is what Futures
Literacy and UNESCO are all about.
Claire:
When I think about the UN and organizations such as the World Bank and World
Economic Forum that carry a lot of weight in the global dialogue on the future we want,
I find that a lot of the leadership elite responsible for the Global Commons do not have
futures literacy. What trends are you seeing now within the UN system of the leadership
itself becoming more literate in futures constructs and thinking?
Riel:
You raise a very important issue, one that the UN system is aware of. For instance, the
High Level Committee on Programs, which is the coordinating body of the United
Nations, is very interested in enhancing futures thinking capabilities and capacities. But
let me underscore something that I think makes this quite different from what we were
doing in the past. There’s a shift that’s occurred in the last, let’s say 30 to 50 years in
our understanding of human agency, it can be summarized as the capability approach.
Combined with advances in our understanding of complexity, I think we are beginning
to move away from the command and control, bureaucratic, administrative, top-down,
visionary leadership approach to thinking about human wellbeing.
This includes a different perspective on the word ‘development’, beyond the conventional
notions of progress – which were highly extrapolatory and in this sense preservationist. I
believe it is this deterministic and objectivist approach to the world and human agency
that generated conditions like climate change. Clearly, humanity did not decide to
induce climate change. But I think that if we take the approach to the Global Commons
that we will be able to control it and be able to play the engineer of the Global Commons
if we have the right institutions in place and the right leaders, we will simply make the
mess worse. The challenges being brought to the forefront by today’s failures cannot
be addressed at a fundamental level by improving existing systems. Blindness to the
relational nature of phenomena and meaning will not be solved by waving the magic
wand of carbon free energy. Overcoming the alienation that is constitutive and functional
in today’s world calls for change at a deeper level.
Which is where Futures Literacy comes in. The capacity to better understand the sources
of our expectations, hopes and fears. The ability to embrace complexity by being better
able to sense and make-sense of emergent novelty. Getting better at spontaneity and
improvisation. Overcoming the bias to path-dependent options in order to satisfy a
desire for certainty. Offering ways to turn means into ends and actions in the present into
modest, often ephemeral gifts. This is the deep empowerment enabled by being ‘futures
literate’. From a capability perspective it is the difference between saying I’m going
to read to you or you’re going to read and write for yourself. By gaining an awareness
of the sources of hope and fear. By enhancing the ability to generate aspirations and
situate disappointment, Futures Literacy opens up a radically different relationship to
past, used and official futures. Facilitates seeing differently, less constrained by planning,
preparation and the fetishism of immortality (continuity of systems). It is time to gain
a better understanding of where fears and hopes come from. In other words, to take
control of our imagination, and not get trapped in images of Wakanda, the New York
City skyline, The efforts of the United Nations system, an institutional framework built
in the 19th and 20th centuries, to transform why and how the future is used reflects not
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