Description
Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of government organisations 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, the end products of futures work – Futures Strategic Assessments (FSA) – were designed to underpin national strategy, guide government policies, and inform decisions about defence capabilities.
Now that more than two decades have passed since government organisations began to produce futures strategic assessments, the time is ripe to take stock of these efforts.
This paper evaluates the impact FSA have had in two democracies (the UK and Japan), and one 'soft-authoritarian' country (Singapore). Using a comparative, mixed-methods research design, the paper gauges the extent to which early futures analyses produced in these three countries between 1999-2001 shaped national security strategy.
