#Resources

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…

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

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…

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…

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

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.