UNESCO Chair on Responsible Foresight for Sustainable Development

Building Capacity to Reimagine the Future 

We co-produce knowledge through partnerships with institutions in the Global South, mainly in Higher Education and NGOs. Projects involve the creation of new knowledge and new practices through research, education, and training. Foresight as practice helps to explore and reimagine the future.  

Our projects are concerned with understanding and achieving better futures – not as a distant place but as a desirable state created through what we can achieve today. The future is a real and significant space for inspiring the development of aspiration and capabilities. We take an explicit focus on creating futures responsibly; on ways to frame and imagine futures; on achieving possible transformations; on the multiple competencies required to create better futures; and on enabling specific action. 

This is not a predictive forecasting exercise, but an anticipatory process of intention, policy, practices, and critical articulation of consequences. Asking questions such as: how does our joint research and expertise change the way that the future is framed and anticipated? How can the capacity to shape the future be developed?

This means putting extant knowledge and expertise to work as futures thinking. The process of engaging with the future is intended to influence learning, education, research, applied practices, and policy. And from such activities all of us can gain new knowledge to develop more effective and inclusive approaches. 

Our activities for the coming years include:  

• Research and Capacity Building Events 
• Responsible Futures  
• Anticipatory Research and Impact 
• Facilitating Research  
• Exchanges and Partnerships 
• Doctoral Studies  

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The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.