Anticipatory Governance is about the survival of democracy into the indefinite and uncertain future. It has three components: strategic foresight; the ability to efficiently convert that foresight into prescient action; and the ability to assess results of these actions in order to be able to make corrections as needed. Each of these capabilities is a system unto itself. Anticipatory governance is an interactive system of these systems.
Our careers, whether individually or as a team, have been about the theory and practice of these ideas. This website is a compilation of some of what we think are our best writings on the subject. Its objective is to serve as a resource for students and for practitioners. From early days, we have been aware that events are accelerating in a way that challenges the adaptive capacity of democratic governance.
What was once complicated has become complex. And what is presently complex threatens to become chaotic. Democracy can manage complexity, but it cannot survive chaos.
To avoid chaos systems of governance must be adapted for the purpose; to design and manage those systems is an oncoming responsibility of elected officials and of public servants. To enable them requires the existence of a public that has been prepared for the changing requirements of citizens in a democracy. We hope that these materials will be useful for these purposes.
This is a collection of work on the subject of foresight and its application to democracy, that has been developed by Leon S. Fuerth and Sheila R. Ronis. Democratic governments can only survive if they study the future, as well as the past.
This website is organized in three parts: one part for each of us individually, covering what we have done and occasionally continue to do as such, and one part covering what we have done in partnership, which dates from 2007. It is not a work of scholarship, but rather of imagination, harnessed to disciplined analysis. It is a response to the dogmatism that increasingly drives people into mutually exclusive and increasingly hostile understandings of the time that we are passing through, ignoring the reality that the world is not linear, but complex. In all three categories, we have presented our work in chronological — as opposed to thematic order. That is because our thinking is cumulative, and it is easier to understand what we have to say in the moment, if you have understood its evolution over time.
– Leon S. Fuerth and Sheila R. Ronis
Download the full PDF books from links below.
Report to the Rockefellers Fund (executive summary)
Report to the Rockefellers Fund (full text)