How strategic foresight-driven policy can make economies more competitive

Countries that anticipate change, rather than merely reacting to it, typically gain a competitive edge. In fact, the most competitive economies are those that prepare for multiple scenarios in their national planning processes to tackle the moving target of technological and social transformation.

That’s why a new generation of policy-makers around the world are turning to strategic foresight – the practice of anticipating future trends and disruptions – to design policies that are agile, data-driven and resilient.

It can transform policy-making from a reactive to a proactive exercise, allowing nations to future-proof their economies, nurture innovation and drive long-term resilience. Coupled with intelligent systems, strategic foresight-driven policy helps anticipate disruption rather than merely responding to it. It enables policy-makers to design strategies in which data, trends and imagination come together to shape the future.

When treated as a governance tool, rather than a one-off exercise, strategic foresight can reshape how governments think, plan and act. By integrating future scenarios, trend mapping, strategic optionality and horizon scanning into the policy-making process, leaders can test ideas against multiple futures – not just the most likely one.

This makes national strategies more resilient to shocks and better aligned with long-term ambitions such as sustainability, competitiveness and human development. When done well, strategic foresight becomes the connective tissue between vision and execution that helps economies to coordinate and identify trade offs early, and to make the right decisions.

To fully integrate strategic foresight into the policy lifecycle, it should connect each stage of policy planning – from formulation to evaluation – to ensure agility and coherence:

Data-driven insights and scenario-based planning should feed into the overall context of the landscape being tackled, such as the economy, technology or energy and infrastructure.

Diverse stakeholders should be engaged to ensure competing opinions are included in strategy discussions and to discover anything that you didn’t know you needed to know.

Iterative pilots for new strategies and policies should be designed using accelerators and small-scale trials in cities and neighbourhoods, special economic zones and other regional hubs.

Robust ways to monitor and measure the impact of these trials should be developed, with the results used for policy refinement.

By using this process for strategic foresight, policies become living, adaptive frameworks that are tested, refined and scaled using real-time feedback loops at every stage of the policy lifecycle.

Strategic intelligence and foresight-driven policy-making uses the most relevant data, insights and expert judgment to make better choices, faster.

The UAE has partnered with the World Economic Forum to build a national Strategic Intelligence platform anchored in the We the UAE Vision 2031 to turn big questions into clear options. The UAE has made this part of its everyday governance so ministries, councils and partners can see what’s changing in the world, compare scenarios and make decisions with confidence.

These shared insights can be used to align priorities and turn signals into practical next steps on strategic topics that directly impact national vision and strategies in areas such as the economy, tourism, energy and infrastructure, technology, and food and water security.

The Prime Minister’s Office has embedded the national Strategic Intelligence platform across ministries and policy domains. It has introduced this by training teams to use the platform and showing them how features like transformation maps can help with horizon scanning, stress-testing and coordination.

This is helping policy-makers to prepare multiple paths and then choose the right one, leading to decision-making that is timely, clear and lower-risk. By building shared tools, implementing them together and keeping policy options open, disruption doesn’t set the agenda, strategy does.

Other countries are also finding that combining strategic foresight with agile execution turns anticipation into measurable advantage. Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures embeds horizon scanning and scenarios into policy sprints, informing national AI and skills strategies, for example. In Finland, the government’s National Foresight Network feeds cross-ministerial scenarios into budgeting. This enabled a quick pivot during energy price shocks in recent years.

Elsewhere, regulatory sandboxes, such as those pioneered by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, can convert foresight on fintech risks into iterative rules to help unlock innovation while managing harm. Foresight plus agility can reduce the impact of fintech risks such as cybercrime and threats, while also boosting productivity, building resilience and a competitive edge.

Jordan recently established the National Council for Future Technology (NCFT) to institutionalise strategic foresight practices into government processes and establish clear policy actions to promote investment in accelerating technology ecosystems, attracting talent, upskilling workforces and adapting regulations for frontier technologies.

Economies can also learn from one another and establish shared learning networks to exchange best practices. As economies in different stages of their policy cycles, there is a lot that the NCFT could gain from the UAE’s whole-of-government foresight practices, for example, and vice versa.

Collaborative foresight thrives on collective intelligence. Both the UAE and the World Economic Forum have worked together through the Global Future Councils, the We The UAE 2031 Strategic Intelligence Hub and other regional partnerships to create policy models that reflect diverse expertise and anticipate new regional and global trends.

With this kind of collaborative approach, strategic foresight can drive a global conversation about shaping the future together.