The Only Indian in the Room (and Other Stories from a Week in Brussels)
In August this year, I was awarded the inaugural Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Award by the School of International Futures for my initiative — Decolonizing Futures. This work, born out of my own experience as an Indian student of Foresight, is an attempt to bring epistemological plurality to contemporary foresight practices. By using folk-storytelling as a tool for inclusion of marginalized, indigenous, and non-western perspectives, it aims to challenge hegemonic/dominant ideas and re-imagine narratives of our collective futures.
As a young practitioner, I feel honoured to have been given this platform to develop my voice in the field. In a short period of four months, since the award was announced, I have got incredible opportunities to learn and grow. One such opportunity came last week when I was invited to Brussels by the European Political Strategy Centre of the European Commision to attend their annual European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) Conference. Convening under the theme Global Trends to 2030: Shaping the Future in a Fast-Changing World, this two-day event brought together global foresight practitioners and strategists to explore and share insights on the social, economic, technological and geopolitical trends shaping the future of Europe and the world.
In addition to being my first visit to Brussels, this trip was special as it brought the newly formed Next Generation Foresight Practitioner (NGFP) Network together for the first time. The NGFP network is a diverse group of young innovators who are leading their communities in planning and shaping the future. I, along with 13 other Special Awardees who are part of the network, collectively represent fourteen different countries and areas of intervention as diverse as public policy, education, agriculture, community-activism, international development, and design/innovation. Our time together in Brussels became both an active site for exchange of ideas, advice, and stories as well as an opportunity to explore synergies in our work. Personally, I consider being a part of this inspiring community of purpose-driven young professionals who are unapologetically and tirelessly working towards addressing issues that affect the futures of their peoples, communities, nations, and industries, as the most wonderful aspect of winning the NGFP award.
In the coming year, we hope to leverage our collective creative energy to develop a global network of new age future-alert activists that are committed to changing existing conversations on the future through innovative strategic foresight approaches. Despite the wide variety in our interests, we identified strong common themes that are central to our individual projects. There is a definite emphasis on the need for creating more inclusive processes for foresighting futures so as to include, otherwise marginalized, perspectives of local communities, women, and children in futures work. It has been my firm belief that while an individual can initiate change, it takes a community to make that change scalable and sustainable. After our crackling first meeting in Brussels last week, I feel optimistic about the potential of the NGFP community to be a sum greater than its parts and to fill an important gap in the contemporary foresight landscape.
At the ESPAS Conference, we spent the first day exploring the ‘Future of Democracy and Governance’. The panel discussions and keynotes resulted in a rich and interesting discussion that highlighted some of the key concerns and drivers of change shaping the state of democracy globally. A pressing issue identified was the role of disruptive technologies and weaponization of information in critically threatening existing systems of global governance. Frans Timmermans, first vice-president of the European Commission, noted that the “changes in our society can be compared to the invention of the printing press. Each invention can potentially lead to a complete re-invention of the society.” The discomfort with high uncertainty associated with the fast increasing influence of the tech industry and the anticipated multi-level proliferation of AI was clearly evident. As a practitioner working at the intersection of systems thinking and foresight, I believe there is an urgent need to embed both long-term thinking as well as an increased awareness about multiple order implications of the complex causal relationships between innovations and policies in our systems of governance. As Pei Shan Lim, head of the Centre for Strategic Futures in Singapore, rightly articulated — “the challenge for governments is to constantly think about how we can be surprised” not just by the advancements in technology but by the behavioural change that new technology inspires in its consumers.
Interestingly, the world’s largest democracy — India, remained largely missing from most narratives about the ‘Future of Democracy’ being discussed. As I took the stage briefly for a rapid 30-second introduction of my initiative, I became instantly aware of my presence as the only Indian in the room. While this lack of representation was perhaps reflective of the diplomatic relations between India and EU, it also co-incides with the low visibility of South Asian voices in general and Indian voices in particular in the global futures discourse that had inspired the Decolonizing Futures initiative in the first place. For India, one of the world’s fastest-growing large economies and home to 18% the world population to remain absent from a conversation about the future of global governance and democracy raises many questions. “We are not paying attention,” said King’s College London’s Bérénice Guyot-Réchard. Is this a blind spot that the EU needs to pay attention to? Why has India, despite viewing itself as a rising global power, failed to capture the global imagination? How is India imagining and creating its preferred futures and with what global implications? Is there an opportunity for India to learn from its own traditional cultural knowledge and long-standing history of fighting with and adapting to social, political, and environmental change, to emerge as a global leader in these times of unprecedented change and high uncertainty?
For me, it acts as a reminder of why started doing what I am doing. Our collective imagination about the future of our civilization continues to remain dominated by a historically privileged worldview. The many invisible and marginalised voices need to be given a platform in foresight work, so that we may move beyond the limitations of our existing models of thinking. To understand what that might look like, let’s consider the now widely-accepted need to give primacy to sustainability and to ‘invent’ imaginaries of ecological prosperity, that came up a few times on Day 2 of the conference. “We are destroying the book of life before we have read it” noted Professor (Lord) Martin Rees during his keynote speech on Global Governance in the Anthropocene Age. It made me think about all the times while working with indigenous and non-western communities, I have been struck by the inherent environment-centric lens with which they imagine the prefered futures of humanity. Could our efforts to design products, systems, and policies for a sustainable future be strengthened by recovering these alternate ways of knowing, being, and doing?
Of the many ideas that were discussed during the power-packed two-day conference, I resonated deeply with Kristel Van der Elst’s thoughts on the need to “stop trying to find one truth”. While speaking about the future of ‘evidence-based’ decision making in our increasingly pluralistic societies, she highlighted the need to acknowledge the diversity in values and the resultant diversity in interpretation of information that shapes our decisions. As Kristel said, “We have to question our assumptions, be open to learning from comparing and contrasting views of the future.” For me, that is the essential first step towards #decolonizingfutures.