Anticipatory Governance in Practice
Masterclass + PRISM lab for “Gobernanza Colaborativa y Anticipatoria” expert program
A masterclass translating anticipatory governance into practical building blocks, and ending with a PRISM exercise to refract megatrends into concrete implications for governance in the Iberian Peninsula.
Challenge
Many public institutions can see disruption coming — climate risk, technological acceleration, demographic pressure, geopolitical instability — but struggle to respond while choices are still open. The issue is rarely awareness. It’s institutional traction: foresight becomes a side activity, treated like prediction, or arrives too late to influence strategy, budgets, or legislation.
As part of the Título Experto Gobernanza Colaborativa y Anticipatoria expert program, the masterclass needed to help participants move from concept to practice: how to embed anticipatory capability into real decision-making and collaborative governance work.
Approach
We delivered Anticipatory Governance in Practice as a guest lecture and applied masterclass, built around three moves:
1) A shared foundation: what anticipatory governance is (and isn’t)
We framed anticipatory governance as the ability of institutions to identify emerging challenges early and respond while options remain open — with foresight used to inform today’s decisions, not to “get the future right.”
2) From theory to institutional design
Using OECD-informed lenses, we expl y governance enables (futures-ready policies, endurance, direction, innovation) and why it often fails in practice (separation from decision-making, one-off exercises, prediction traps, fragility under political change, weak authority/timing).
We then introduced four pragmatic “building blocks” that show up consistently in succesful anticipatory governance work
A decision hook (link to strategy/budget/legislation)
A stable institutional home with strong mandate
Meaningful participation to test assumptions early
A learning loop to revisit policy as conditions change
3) PRISM lab: refracting megatrends into governance implications
We ended with a Megatrends PRISM exercise — Possibilities, Risks, Inquiries, Signals, Mindsets — using it as a practical lens for translating macro shifts into governance implications in the Iberian Peninsula.
The aim was to help participants move from “big trends” to actionable outputs: Emerging signals to watch, mindset shifts required, and concrete opportunity/risk considerations for governance and collaboration.
Outcomes
1) A practical language for anticipatory governance
Participants gained a clear way to articulate anticipatory governance beyond buzzwords, as institutional capability tied to decision-making, participation, and learning loops.
2) Tools to diagnose why foresight fails, and what to build instead
We provided a grounded set of best practices to avoid prediction bias, one-offs, timing/authority gaps and a set of design principles to increase durability across changing political priorities.
3) Megatrend implications translated into governance-relevant outputs
Through PRISM, participants produced reframed implications and questions tailored to their governance contexts, a bridge from futures thinking to collaborative governance practice
