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As part of the UN’s Our Common Agenda, an intergovernmental process on digital governance has been put in place to produce the ‘Global…

Why future proofing? In the words of António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, “many of today’s multilateral frameworks are…

> “…I don’t believe that predicting the future is really what we’re about. After all, we ourselves, or at least the younger ones among us…

The Executive Office of the Secretary-General (EOSG) of the United Nations is publishing a series of policy briefs to inform the Our Common…

The Executive Office of the Secretary-General (EOSG) of the United Nations is publishing a series of policy briefs to inform the Our Common…

On 10th March 2022, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stated that: “(…) there is renewed pressure to consider whether global…

Summary: From the 13th-16th January, the Simon Institute hosted 30 actors from across the multilateral system and academia to discuss risks…

Future generations are fundamentally disempowered: they will inherit the planet and society we leave for them, yet they have no say in how…

In August 2022, SI was invited to contribute to two consultations held by the United Nations Foundation and High-Level Advisory Board member…

This post outlines SI’s strategic thinking around and current plan to engage with Our Common Agenda (OCA). The plan was developed in July…

What is it like to be a policymaker during the COVID-19 pandemic?  What might it be like during the next pandemic or another global crisis…

From May 23-28, SI’s CEO Maxime Stauffer attended the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR) to speak on how the disaster risk…

SI has proven its value through knowledge synthesis, workshop facilitation and high-level events. This combination of activities has granted SI mandates to directly work on key policy processes relevant to global catastrophic risk reduction for the coming years.

Strengthening science-policy capacity to mitigate Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs) is difficult. As GCRs have not happened in the recent…

After demonstrating the potential for substantial impact in its first nine months of existence, SI enters the final stage of its startup…

The Geneva Science-Policy Interface (GSPI) and the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI) are pleased to invite you to explore the in-person table-top exercise Preparedness. Sessions will be held at the UN Library between November 25 and November 30, 2021.

This event already took place. You can read a recap of it on the blog of the Geneva Science-Policy Interface. Complementing the BWC Meeting…

As summer is coming to an end, we wanted to share an update with you. Recent highlights from our blog: Building the field of long-term…

Together with the Geneva Science-Policy Interface, SI contributes “Behavioral Solutions for Evidence-based Decision-making” to the UN High…

With this collection, we highlight fertile ground for the refinement of a shared understanding of the long term, building on decades of diplomacy that have successfully made long-term flourishing a key motivation for international cooperation. It reminds us of the recency of international institutions, their hopeful vision and the work that remains to be done to secure long-term survival and flourishing.

Our motivation for writing this post comes from observing an increasing number of calls for preparedness which require institutional paradigm shifts of the kind that is observed mostly on centennial scales. Many of the risks that humanity is currently facing seem more urgent. We hope to contribute to accelerating the adoption of a new preparedness paradigm by reviewing what we know about policy change.

In conducting our work, we make choices about the questions we ask, modelling assumptions we make, which literature to rely on, etc. In this short piece, we make explicit the underlying beliefs that inform these decisions. By doing so, we hope to explain our approach, invite constructive criticism and live up to our standard of reasoning transparency.

At SI, we support international policy actors in dealing with uncertainty, complexity, time-pressure and global catastrophic risks. Below is a compilation of fields and resources we draw from and that might be valuable for others.

If humanity survives the next few centuries, there is a fair chance that the vast majority of human life, culture, science, technology, and happiness lies ahead, rather than behind us.

On April 1st at 2 pm CET, we co-hosted the event “Towards 2030: Navigating complexity and information overload in decision-making” as part…

Summary The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI) aims to increase the long-term impact of policymaking processes. In its first 2…

Context Given the difficulty of measuring effects on policy networks, we anchor our strategy in a detailed theory of change. While…