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UNDP's Foresight for CPD Toolkit
Strengthening UNDP’s capacity to anticipate and shape the future
Why use foresight in any strategic planning process?
Foresight is not about predicting the future but about preparing for a range of plausible futures. It shifts the focus from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategy-making, helping Country Offices design plans that are:
Authored by Manasi Kumbhat, Futures Network Coordinator, this guide is an effort to support country offices in applying foresight to the Country Programme Document (CPD) process, ensuring that our strategies are forward-looking, resilient, and informed by a broad, participatory approach.
Please reach out to Manasi Kumbhat if you have any questions on the toolkit.
The Toolkit Process at a Glance
Below you'll find a comprehensive high-level overview of the foresight-informed process outlined in this toolkit. Each chapter incorporates actionable methods, tools and templates to guide teams through both strategic and operational decision-making.
You can download this one pager to guide your exploration of the chapters.
Download a one-page overview of the toolkit process
Download the PDF of the entire Toolkit
Where Do I Start
Use One Chapter or All—This toolkit Adapts to Your Needs.
Each chapter is self-contained and can be used independently based on your CPD development stage. Answer a few quick questions to find out which chapter(s) are most relevant for you.
FAQs
Foresight is the systematic study of change.
It employs structured methodologies to explore multiple possible futures, enabling better decision- making in the present. Unlike prediction or forecasting, foresight does not claim to know what will happen or project today into the future. Both forecasters and foresight experts use today’s facts to think about the future. But forecasters use firm facts and evidence, whereas futurists pay much attention to emerging issues. They focus on understanding what is possible and what is probable to ensure we can proactively shape the future we want to create and avoid undesirable outcomes.
As articulated in the UNDP foresight training developed by the University of Houston, foresight aims to:
- Understand Change: Study trends, disruptions, and weak signals to understand how change is unfolding clearly.
- Build Confidence: Equip decision-makers to make informed choices by preparing for uncertainty.
- Enable Action: Turn insights into actionable strategies to influence the future rather than merely react to it.
- Enhanced Strategic Planning: Foresight enables COs to better align CPD priorities with national and global trends, ensuring that UNDP’s contributions remain relevant and impactful.
- Robust Risk Management: Through tools like scenario planning and wind-tunneling, foresight supports the identification of risks and vulnerabilities, ensuring that programmes are resilient under multiple future conditions.
- Innovation and Opportunity Identification: Foresight helps uncover novel development challenges that others may overlook by exploring plausible futures instead of only probable ones.
- Inclusive and Participatory Programmming: Foresight tools often enable the engagement of diverse stakeholders, fostering co-creation and ensuring that CPDs reflect the aspirations and perspectives of those left furthest behind.
Many guides on strategic foresight focus on introducing the discipline, explaining its theoretical foundations, and providing a broad array of tools for various contexts. While these resources are valuable, they can often feel too general or disconnected from the specific needs of an organization like UNDP.
This guide takes a different approach. It is created by UNDP for UNDP, tailored to the organization’s unique mandate, working processes, and planning frameworks.
Here’s how this guide is different:
The foresight process outlined in this guide is meant to strengthen the internal preparation of the CPD by helping country offices (COs) identify future-informed development challenges. However, the way this foresight process is used will depend on the status of the CF. Below, we outline two scenarios—(1) where the CF is still in development, and (2) where the CF has already been developed—and how the foresight process should be adapted in this case.
In some cases, the country office will be working on its CPD while the CF is still in development.
In this scenario, there is a valuable opportunity for UNDP to take a leadership role within the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) by facilitating a foresight process across agencies. The process laid out in this guide—horizon scanning, driver identification, scenario building, and identifying development challenges—can be adapted as a collaborative exercise to shape the CF itself, making it more future-informed and adaptive to emerging risks and opportunities.
UNDP can propose creating a Core Foresight Team or Task Force within the UNCT to lead the foresight process outlined in this guide.
This team would be a multi-agency group that brings together key representatives from various UN agencies, relevant national counterparts, and external experts.
The goal would be to ensure that the CF is informed by a broad, forward-looking perspective that reflects diverse insights and anticipates future uncertainties.
In many cases, the CF will already be finalized when the country office begins developing its CPD.
In this scenario, the CPD must align with the priorities, outcomes, and goals already set in the CF. The foresight process outlined in this guide is specifically designed for this scenario and helps the UNDP team build a future-informed list of development challenges, even when the Cooperation Framework (CF) is already in place.
When the CO team reaches the Challenge Prioritization stage in the Programme Priorities and Partnerships section, they will need to map the identified development challenges against the CF priorities to ensure alignment.
The team will score and rank challenges using the prioritization tool described in the guide (assessing Strategic Fit, National Strategy Fit, Donor Fit, etc.). During this scoring process, the team will give additional weight to challenges that align strongly with the CF priorities, while still considering other important parameters like urgency, scale, and impact.
