256 institutions in 76 countries exist to make decisions on behalf of people who do not yet exist.
Some are parliamentary committees. One is a river with legal standing. One releases money automatically, before the disaster arrives.
This is a map of how humanity is learning to govern a century it has not reached.
What is anticipatory governance?
Anticipatory governance is what happens when a society builds the capacity to act on the future rather than merely react to the present. It is a systems-based approach for coping with accelerating and complex change: a disciplined link between foresight and policy, networked management, and feedback systems that let a government adjust course. But the practice is broader than any single definition. It includes the parliamentary committee that asks what a bill will mean in forty years, the statute that gives an unborn generation legal standing, the citizens’ assembly that deliberates on behalf of a city not yet built, the forecast that releases humanitarian funding before a drought is confirmed, and the customary law that requires a council to weigh its decisions against the seventh generation to come. What unites them is a refusal to let the electoral cycle, the budget cycle, or the news cycle set the horizon of public decision-making. What divides them, as this map makes visible, is almost everything else.
Where this began
In 2012 I was hired as a visiting research fellow at the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, where I began documenting the different ways governments and societies had tried to institutionalise a futures capacity. What became clear early was that this was not one field but several, each with its own lineage, literature, and community of practice, most of them barely aware of the others. Science and technology foresight had one history; the anticipatory democracy movement of the 1970s had a completely different one; transition management came out of Dutch sustainability scholarship; futures commissions had risen and fallen across a dozen countries. I set out seven traditions in a paper published in the Journal of Futures Studies in 2014 — science, technology and innovation foresight; anticipatory democracy; futures commissions; foresight-informed strategic planning; transition management; integrated governmental foresight; and network foresight, as a way of giving practitioners a map of the terrain they were working in, and designers a palette of strategies they might combine.
Where it stands now
This map is the result of putting that 2014 framework under pressure. Working with Claude, Anthropic’s AI system, I stress-tested the original seven categories against a much larger body of examples than I had access to a decade ago, cases excavated from institutional registries, multilateral case libraries, national government sources, and the futures studies literature, including foundational texts on anticipatory democracy, the Australian Commission for the Future, and cross-cutting government foresight programmes. The seven traditions held up better than I expected, but they strained in specific and interesting places. Some categories needed splitting: anticipatory democracy and sortition-based mini-publics turned out to rest on genuinely different democratic theories. Some needed promotion from footnote to category, as legislative foresight did. And whole families of practice had emerged or been overlooked entirely, statutory guardianship of future generations, trigger-based humanitarian action, predictive and pre-emptive governance, custodial and intergenerational obligation. The result is seventeen traditions rather than seven. Each of the 256 examples was then coded on two axes, its tradition, which determines the map layer, and its mechanism, which determines how anticipation actually touches a decision: through research, legal duty, deliberation, finance, planning, experimentation, or computation. The mechanism filters let you ask a question the layers alone cannot answer, such as which of these institutions actually binds anyone.
A work in progress
This is a starting point, not a finished survey. The coverage is uneven, and knowingly so: research bodies are easy to find in institutional registries and are almost certainly over-represented, while transition arenas and Indigenous custodial governance are almost certainly under-represented, because they do not appear on organisational charts. Every record carries a confidence flag, and a substantial minority are marked medium or low, meaning the institution is real but a founding date, current status, or source link still needs verification. Some coding decisions are arguable and are flagged as such in the data. Judicial foresight is included provisionally, on three records, because the literature insists it exists as a distinct branch even though almost nobody has catalogued it. Corrections, additions, and disagreements are all welcome, particularly from practitioners who know a case from the inside, and most particularly from regions that are thin here, including Central Asia, the Caribbean, Francophone Africa, and the Pacific. If you would like to join the mapping, categorisation, and editing work, get in touch.
The Seventeen Traditions
Developmental Visioning — 27 examples
The most numerous tradition on this map, and in some ways the most revealing. Developmental visioning is the practice of a national government declaring a long-horizon destination — Vision 2030, Vision 2040, Agenda 2063, Indonesia Emas 2045 — and organising state planning around it. Its purpose is partly technical and largely political: it gives a country a shared horizon that outlasts any single administration, signals stability and direction to investors and international partners, and offers citizens a story about where their nation is going. It clusters heavily in the Global South and the Gulf, which is worth sitting with, because it means the most visible long-term governance in the world is happening in precisely the places most often described as short-termist. But it is also the thinnest tradition by mechanism. Of the twenty-seven examples here, every single one operates through planning and targets alone — no legal duty, no deliberative process, no dedicated research capacity, no financial trigger. A vision document commits a government to a destination without committing it to anything else. That is not a reason to exclude these from the map. It is a reason to look carefully at what a marker on a map does and does not tell you.
Integrated Governmental Foresight — 26 examples
This is anticipation as an ordinary competence of the executive branch: a unit, a cycle, a routine. Policy Horizons Canada, Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, the UK’s Government Office for Science, Finland’s Government Foresight Group, the OECD’s Government Foresight Community. Its purpose is to embed forward-looking analysis into the machinery of the administrative state so that departments encounter the future as a normal input to policy rather than an occasional special exercise. This tradition drives the foresight-policy linkage, and it is where most of the world’s professional government foresight capacity actually sits. Its characteristic strength is proximity to decision-makers; its characteristic weakness is that proximity cuts both ways. A unit inside the executive can be reorganised, defunded, or quietly redirected without anyone outside government noticing. Almost everything in this tradition operates through research and advice, which means its influence depends entirely on someone senior choosing to listen.
Futures Commissions and Institutes — 25 examples
Semi-independent bodies whose job is to hold a forward view at arm’s length from the government of the day. Sitra in Finland, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, the Institute for the Future, the Finland Futures Research Centre, the Institute for Futures Research at Stellenbosch, and the Australian Commission for the Future. Their purpose is to create an institutional shelter for long-term thinking — a place where questions that are politically inconvenient, commercially unprofitable, or simply slow can be pursued anyway. Richard Slaughter’s post-mortem on the Australian Commission for the Future remains the sharpest analysis of what makes these bodies live or die, and his conclusion is uncomfortable: what killed the Commission was not the quality of its work but its failure to secure legitimation. It won few friends in parliament, business, education, or social movements, and so lurched from crisis to crisis for twelve years before closing. The lesson generalises. A futures commission’s survival depends less on being right than on being wanted.
Legislative and Parliamentary Foresight — 23 examples
The fastest-growing tradition on this map, and the most fragile. Finland’s Committee for the Future — the world’s first permanent parliamentary futures committee, created in 1993 — has become the template and the patron for a wave of similar bodies in Estonia, Lithuania, Chile, Uruguay, Iceland, the Philippines, Brazil, and Paraguay. Finland’s own 2022 survey found some futures work underway in forty-three parliaments. The purpose is distinct from executive foresight in a way that matters: a parliamentary futures body is accountable to the legislature rather than the government, which makes it a potential counterweight to executive short-termism rather than an extension of executive capacity. It also gives foresight a home in the branch of government most directly answerable to citizens. The fragility is structural. Clem Bezold’s scan of parliamentary futures work identifies champion dependence as the recurring failure mode, and the evidence is stark: Brazil’s Senate Committee on Brazil’s Future was extinguished after its champion retired, Argentina’s did not survive a change of government, Israel’s Commission for Future Generations ended when its founder left the Knesset, and the US Office of Technology Assessment was abolished outright. A committee is only as permanent as the coalition that wants it.
Anticipatory Democracy — 19 examples
The tradition with the deepest roots in this collection and the thinnest institutional residue. Named by Alvin Toffler and developed through Clem Bezold’s 1978 volume Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future, its founding case is Hawaii 2000 — a year-long statewide process in 1970 that drew over two thousand residents into task forces, public lectures, radio and television programmes, school curricula, and a three-day conference, and which produced a set of alternative Hawaiis that remain startling to read. Its purpose is not to produce a plan but to build future-consciousness as a civic capacity: the proposition that ordinary people can and should deliberate about long-range futures, and that a society which does so becomes different in kind. The wave spread through American state visioning in the 1970s — Goals for Georgia, Alternatives for Washington, Iowa 2000 — and through Robert Jungk’s future workshops in Europe. Its record is instructive and sobering. Almost every institution Hawaii 2000 created was later killed by the legislature, some within a few years. The single survivor, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, endured because it was absorbed into the university’s budget. What did survive, on the participants’ own account, was the change in the people who took part. That may be the tradition’s real product, and it is one that maps poorly.
Statutory Guardianship of Future Generations — 18 examples
The tradition that makes anticipation binding. Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act and its Future Generations Commissioner, Hungary’s Ombudsman for Future Generations, Malta’s Guardian of Future Generations, New Zealand’s statutory Long-term Insights Briefings, Estonia’s Foresight Act, and — since 2024 — the UN Declaration on Future Generations. Its purpose is to give the unborn something closer to legal standing: a duty someone must discharge, a report someone must publish, a body someone must consult, and in Hungary’s case a constitutional challenge someone can bring. This is the only tradition on the map where legal duty is the dominant mechanism rather than an occasional feature, and it is the one that most directly answers the objection that foresight is merely advisory. But a statute is not self-executing. The United States House of Representatives added a foresight requirement to its rules in 1975; it remains formally in force and has been largely ignored for decades in the absence of anyone willing to champion it. Law creates an obligation. It does not create the will to meet it.
Science, Technology and Innovation Foresight — 16 examples
The oldest and most methodologically developed tradition, and for several decades effectively synonymous with government foresight itself. Japan’s NISTEP has run national Delphi surveys since the 1970s; Korea’s KISTEP, India’s TIFAC, Türkiye’s TÜBITAK Vision 2023, Germany’s BMBF foresight cycles, and Russia’s HSE Foresight Centre all belong to this lineage. Its purpose is priority-setting: given finite research funding and a contested field of emerging technologies, which capabilities should a nation build, and in what order? The methods — large-scale expert Delphi, technology roadmapping, bibliometric scanning — are the most refined in the entire field, and the tradition’s institutional durability is remarkable, with several of these programmes running continuously for thirty or forty years. Its framing is competitiveness. This tradition asks which technologies a country should pursue, rarely whether it should, and almost never on whose terms — which is precisely the gap that anticipatory technology assessment emerged to fill.
Deliberative Mini-publics and Sortition — 16 examples
Randomly selected citizens, given time and evidence, deliberating on a public question. The Ostbelgien Citizens’ Council in Belgium — the world’s first permanent sortition body embedded in a parliament — the Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland, France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat, Climate Assembly UK, Gdańsk’s binding-threshold assembly, and Mongolia’s remarkable law requiring deliberative polling before constitutional amendment. Its purpose is to produce a considered public judgement that is demonstrably representative, on questions where elected politicians face perverse incentives or genuine deadlock. This is separated here from anticipatory democracy because the two rest on different democratic theories: anticipatory democracy is mass, open, and self-selecting, aiming to change the future-consciousness of a whole population, while sortition is small, statistically representative, and closed, aiming to produce a legitimate answer from a microcosm. The hybrid case is the most interesting on the map — Japan’s Future Design, where participants in Yahaba put on ceremonial robes and deliberate as imaginary residents of 2060, and reliably reach more long-term decisions than groups reasoning as themselves. Across the sixteen examples here, deliberation is the mechanism in every case; finance and computation appear in none.
Foresight-Informed Strategic Planning — 15 examples
The most ambiguous of the original seven, as I acknowledged in 2014, and still the hardest to bound. This is foresight folded into the statutory planning cycle: Infrastructure Victoria’s mandated thirty-year strategy, Bangladesh’s Delta Plan 2100 with its adaptive sequencing under deep uncertainty, Costa Rica’s decarbonisation pathway to 2050, Peru’s CEPLAN with its legal requirement that foresight enter sectoral and regional plans, and city plans from Bristol to Boston to Sydney. Its purpose is the least glamorous and possibly the most consequential: to make the long view a compulsory input into decisions that are going to be made anyway, about infrastructure, land, water, and capital that will outlive everyone in the room. Planning is where anticipation meets money and concrete. The tradition’s weakness is that a planning horizon is easily reset by a new administration, and its strength is that once a bridge or a levee or a transmission corridor exists, it has already committed the future in ways no vision document can.
Network and Commons Foresight — 14 examples
Anticipation distributed across a network rather than concentrated in an institution. The Millennium Project with its seventy country nodes and Real-Time Delphi, Participedia’s crowdsourced repository of democratic innovations, Ushahidi’s crowdmapping platform born from Kenyan post-election violence, Taiwan’s vTaiwan consensus process, Decidim, and the open directories now emerging from the UN Futures Lab and the School of International Futures. Its purpose is to make foresight capacity a commons — something many people can contribute to and draw from, rather than a service purchased from experts. This tradition has aged faster than any other. The platforms I catalogued in 2012 are mostly gone, and the live version of network foresight now runs through AI-mediated collective intelligence: opinion-mapping tools, large-scale sensemaking, machine-assisted deliberation. The underlying proposition has not changed, and it remains the most direct challenge to the assumption that anticipation requires an institution at all.
Anticipatory Technology Assessment and Responsible Innovation — 13 examples
The same objects as science and technology foresight, with the normative charge reversed. This tradition asks not which technologies to accelerate but what they will do to us, who decides, and how publics get a say before the fact rather than after. The US Office of Technology Assessment, the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag, the Rathenau Instituut, TA-SWISS, the Austrian Academy’s Institute of Technology Assessment, and — crucially — Arizona State University’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society, where David Guston formalised the term anticipatory governance around a triad of foresight, public engagement, and the integration of social science into technical practice. Its purpose is to widen the circle of people who get to shape a technology while it is still shapeable. The tradition’s history contains its own warning: the OTA was a global template for parliamentary technology assessment and was abolished in 1995 by a Speaker who was himself a futurist.
Predictive and Pre-emptive Governance — 10 examples
The tradition on this map that its own practitioners would be least likely to call foresight, and the one that most needs to be here. Early warning systems, composite risk indices, epidemic intelligence hubs, national security horizon scanning, frontier AI evaluation, and regulation that classifies systems by anticipated risk before harm occurs: FEWS NET, the INFORM Risk Index, the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, Singapore’s Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning system, the EU AI Act. Its purpose is to make anticipation continuous, automated, and infrastructural — built into systems rather than convened as an exercise. It belongs on this map because a great deal of the world’s actual anticipatory capacity now lives here, and because a map that shows only the anticipation we approve of is advocacy rather than scholarship. It also carries the field’s sharpest critique: writers including Louise Amoore and Brian Massumi have argued that pre-emption is a mode of power, not merely a technique, and that acting on a future that has not happened forecloses the possibility of it happening otherwise. Every tradition on this map does that to some degree. This one does it at scale, with data, and often without asking.
Trigger-based Anticipatory Action — 8 examples
Probably the largest anticipatory governance field in the world by money moved, and almost entirely unread by the futures community. Forecast-based financing, Early Action Protocols, the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund anticipatory pilots, FAO’s anticipatory action roadmaps, the African Risk Capacity sovereign risk pool, and ASEAN’s regional framework. The logic is precise: agree the trigger in advance, arrange the finance in advance, agree the actions in advance, and the money moves automatically when a forecast crosses a threshold — before the drought is confirmed, before the flood arrives, before the appeal is launched. Its purpose is to convert anticipation from an argument into a contract, which sidesteps the problem that defeats most other traditions on this map: the need to persuade someone, in the moment, to act on a future they cannot see. It is the only tradition here where finance is the dominant mechanism. The trade-off is that a trigger is only as good as the model behind it, and the deliberative content approaches zero.
Transition Management — 8 examples
Developed at DRIFT in Rotterdam by Derk Loorbach and Jan Rotmans and applied first to Dutch energy policy, transition management treats long-term change as something to be steered through arenas and experiments rather than planned from above. It convenes coalitions of frontrunners outside the incumbent system, gives them space to develop transition paths, runs real-world experiments, and monitors reflexively — accepting that the destination will be reworked as the coalition learns. Examples here include the Dutch energy transition programme, Gipuzkoa’s Etorkizuna Eraikiz model, the doughnut economics city network, UNDP’s Accelerator Labs, and Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. Its purpose is to work on transitions that are too systemic for any single agency and too contested for conventional planning. It is under-represented on this map and I want to be explicit about why: transition management lives in arenas, coalitions, and practices, not in organisational charts, so a database built from institutional registries will always undercount it.
Custodial and Intergenerational Obligation — 8 examples
The oldest lineages here and the most thinly documented. The Haudenosaunee requirement that deliberations weigh their effect on the seventh generation to come; Aotearoa New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act granting the Whanganui River legal personhood with guardians who speak for it, and Te Urewera vested in itself under a Tūhoe-majority board; the Yarra River Protection Act, co-titled in Woi Wurrung and requiring a fifty-year community vision for the Birrarung; the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council; rights of nature in Ecuador’s constitution and Bolivia’s Mother Earth law; the Atrato River ruling in Colombia. What distinguishes this tradition is its grounding: anticipation here rests on obligation to descendants and to country rather than on forecasts of what may come. It does not need to predict the future in order to be bound by it. Kyle Whyte’s argument that Indigenous peoples already inhabit a condition their ancestors would recognise as post-apocalyptic reframes the temporality of the entire field. The eight records here are formal legal instruments only, which is exactly the wrong bias for this tradition, and expanding it properly is the single largest piece of unfinished work on this map.
Anticipatory Innovation Governance — 7 examples
The newest self-conscious tradition, developed through the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation since around 2019 and effectively a synthesis of integrated governmental foresight and transition management. It treats anticipation, experimentation, and continuous learning as core capacities of governance rather than specialist functions, and it has been tested through embedded engagements — Project LIMinal with Lithuania, Italy and Malta, the city of Helsingborg in Sweden, the province of Gipuzkoa in Spain. Its purpose is to close the gap that defeats so much foresight work: producing an insight is not the same as changing what an institution can do. By focusing on the administrative system itself rather than on any particular future, it tries to build the muscle rather than deliver the message. It is early, and it is worth watching whether it institutionalises or dissipates.
Judicial Foresight — 3 examples (provisional)
Included provisionally, because both the historical record and the literature insist it exists while almost no one has catalogued it. Every other tradition on this map sits in the executive or the legislature. Yet courts make decisions with horizons measured in generations, and there is a real if sparse lineage of judicial futures work — led by Jim Dator and Sohail Inayatullah — that runs from a 1972 Hawaii judiciary futures conference, through the Justice Horizons forecasting newsletter and a 1980 strategic plan that made anticipating the future one of five dimensions of a judiciary, to the 1991 Hawaii Judicial Foresight Congress and the Reinventing Courts for the 21st Century visioning guidebook. On the authors’ own assessment, this was the most durable and widely spread outcome of the entire Hawaii 2000 process, now present in court systems across the United States and in common-law jurisdictions internationally. Three records is not a survey. It is a flag planted on a gap, and an invitation.
Map and database compiled 2026. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections and contributions welcome.