Riel:
Thank you very much for the invitation. I’m glad to be able to contribute to this important
Claire:
series that you’re creating. You’re posing some central questions of our time. Questions
that need to be situated very carefully in the context of our current history and the way
in which aspirations, like the SDGs, interact with our capabilities. Let me start by pointing
out that UNESCO’s mandate is really focused on human knowledge – its creation
and use. The silos of education, culture and science, hark back to earlier institutional
compartments. Today the crucial question is how can human knowledge, in all its forms
and applications, best contribute to the realization of people’s aspirations? One strand
of a response to this question is developing the capacity to better understand why and
how the future is part of what we see and do. A better understanding of the future is
constitutive of efforts to understand the Sustainable Development Goals and make the
choices meant to advance Agenda 2030. For UNESCO, in its role as the global crossroads
of human knowledge, the world’s ‘laboratory of ideas’, this means cultivating advances
in a fundamental capability – the capacity to ‘use-the-future’ – which we call Futures
So UNESCO has decided to push this idea of futures literacy. So why futures literacy and
what is the vision of the futures literacy network?
Riel:
The basic reason is that people ‘use-the-future’ all the time – although most of the time
no one pays attention to the anticipatory systems and processes that enable them to
‘use-the-future’. The term ‘using-the-future’, might seem a bit strange, but it just refers
to the fact that, for instance, in order to arrange this interview we both imagined the
future. What is fascinating is that we all know that the future does not actually exist.
If it existed it would be the present, not the future. No one can go there. The future is
always imaginary. This means that Futures Studies is the study of why are we using our
imagination and how? The key challenge then becomes understanding this why and
how, or exploring and becoming more skilled at ‘using-the-future’. Futures literacy is
not a specific technique or tool or method. Futures literacy is a capability, in this sense
it is very similar to reading and writing. Futures Literacy can be learned, and improved.
Literacy. Like every capability it can be understood on the basis of a particular set of theories and
The Sustainable Development Goals are one important way of thinking about the future. inherently good or bad. When someone learns to read or write there is no way to know if
But as all good futures studies people and foresight thinkers know, we can and should they will apply their capability to poetry, bombs, or both.
imagine many different kinds of futures. That there are many different ways and reasons
for thinking about the future. Indeed, the SDGs provide an opportunity for us to reflect
on the ways in which we ‘use-the-future’ to construct our fears and hopes.
practices. Furthermore, because it is a capability, a means to a variety of ends, it is not
This means that becoming ‘futures literate’ is not a guarantee of a better future, since
we cannot know how this capability will be used. What we do know, in keeping with
UNESCO’s role in cultivating human knowledge, is that a better understanding of
anticipatory systems and processes enables better understanding of what’s going on in
the world. I am also convinced, by the evidence we have collected here at UNESCO over
the last seven years running Futures Literacy Laboratories – over 60 now – that people
are able to become more futures literate. And that when they do they change their
relationship to both the future and the present. For most people this is very liberating.
They are able to overcome the often dominant expectation that the future is something
we can and should colonize, imposing today’s ideas on tomorrow. Futures Literacy also
helps to overcome the fears and dashed hopes that arise from the delusion that the
future can be controlled, that humans can play god, engineering tomorrow, slaying
uncertainty and assuring that best laid plans will always come to fruition.
Being ‘futures literate’ enables people to overcome their fear of the only constant
– change. Futures Literacy enables people to embrace complexity as the source of
creativity and the wonderful playground our powerful resource: imagination. We can
stop being frightened by the fact that we live in a creative and complex universe, one
that is not deterministic or predictable. Futures Literacy is the capability for our times.
It enables us to let go of many of the things that we thought were so important – like
being able to predict and control the future. It heralds a paradigmatic change in the
way we construct our expectations. Similar to previous radical breaks, like the change
from believing the world is flat to understanding that science shows us that the world is
round. Using Futures Literacy to embrace complexity enables people to reconsider some
of the very basic ways they see the world. Which is why it makes sense for UNESCO to
pioneer the exploration of the diversity of people’s anticipatory systems and processes.
Futures Literacy is a quintessential example of how developments in human knowledge
can serve humanity in ways that reflect our changing aspirations and hopes, our desire
for diversity and to better understand the world. In a nutshell we’re talking about science,
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