World futures

The World of 2020 and Alternative Futures

Ambiguous Futures: Global Warming and the Third World

The increasing global warming of the earth has been at the foreground of scientific and political debate, leading to international agreements such as The Kyoto Protocol in 1997. While there are some promising signs that the international community is taking the reality of global warming seriously, the limited objectives for diminishing the amount of greenhouse gases are insufficient. If scienti...

The Mumbai World Social Forum: Alternative Futures from the Grassroots

I recall an Indian proverb saying that, as all rivers find the same ocean, so too do all paths reach the same source. Perhaps this is a fitting analogy for the World Social Forum (WSF), the fourth of which was recently held in Mumbai India from the 16th 21st of January. For as each of the over 130,000 droplets arrived by plane, train, rickshaw, bicycle and by foot, they began self-organising in...

Beyond Strategy: Leadership, Futures and Ethics in a Complex World

The basic premise of the "Beyond Strategy" approach is that in business we put up fantasy measures that we call business planning, such as budget planning and strategic planning, which Stacey claims is a political process, primarily as social defences against anxiety. This distorts what we are actually doing and distracts us from the actual direct experiences we are having of each other as what...

Alternative futures for world cereal and meat consumption.

Fundamental changes in the global structure of food demand will lead to an extraordinary increase in the importance of developing countries in global food markets. Economic growth in developing countries is changing consumption patterns, with slower growth (and in many countries actual declines) in per capita food consumption of grains and rapidly growing per capita and total meat consumption, ...