Within the scope of his study funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, researcher Dr. Eitan Oren looks at futures strategic trends, threats, and opportunities, within the context of state-security and tries to find out how governments seek to anticipate and prepare for those. Doing so, he looks at the UK, Japan, and Singapore over the period between 1997-2021, seeks to evaluate the process and show, how the analyses influenced decision making. In this interview, the researcher outlines the scope of this project but also talks about the scientific relevance and the source material he uses for his work.
"Futures Strategic Assessment were designed to underpin national strategy"
L.I.S.A.: Dear Dr. Oren, you are working on a research project on the topic of British, Japanese, and Singaporean Futures Strategic Assessments, 1997-2021, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Could you briefly explain the scope of your project? Why is it scientifically worthwhile to deal with the topic?
Dr. Oren: This project aims to enhance our understanding of the processes by which governments anticipate futures strategic trends, threats, and opportunities, within the context of state-security. Using a comparative, mixed-methods research design, the project advances in three stages. First, it investigates how three governments – two democracies and one “soft-authoritarian” – produced futures strategic assessments over the period between 1997-2021. Second, the project evaluates the assessments’ soundness, both in terms of analytical process and projections’ accuracy. Third, the project gauges the extent to which futures analyses shaped national security strategy, security policy, and decisions about defence capabilities.
Why is it important?
Since the late 1980s an increasing number of governments around the world have attempted to anticipate and prepare for futures by launching mechanisms to assess long-term trends, threats and opportunities within the context of state-security. Looking ten to thirty years ahead, these mechanisms have used varying human and financial resources and diverse methods to map futures. The end products of this line of work – Futures Strategic Assessment – were designed to underpin national strategy, guide government policies, and inform decisions about defence capabilities. Despite good reasons to track the soundness of futures strategic assessments and their impact on policy, governments rarely keep a scorecard of these issues. Now that more than two decades have passed since governments began to produce futures strategic assessments, the time is ripe to take stock of these efforts.
The UK, Japan and Singapore were chosen as case-studies because futures strategic work in these countries diverged on key attributes, including regime type, the makeup of the organisation leading the assessment, and its relationship to key decision-makers; the assessment’s methodology and conceptual framework; and the belief clusters of key individuals involved in the process. Such variance in key attributes enables one to evaluate the extent to which particular attributes of the strategic assessment might be correlated with better foresight/forecasting outcomes as well as with higher impact on national policy.