LocationsOperationalising Foresight in Portfolio Management in Cambodia
From Signals to Systems
May 22, 2025
Making Foresight Practical
From Signals to Systems: Operationalising Foresight in Portfolio Management in Cambodia
The Context
Over the past few years, the Cambodia Country Office has made significant strides in embedding foresight into its ways of working. Horizon scanning – the practice of observing and capturing signals of change – once an experimental side practice, has steadily grown into a core activity — shaping conversations, informing strategic planning, and cultivating a culture of future-consciousness across the office.
Despite its momentum, a key challenge persisted: how to make horizon scanning actionable for colleagues in programme delivery. While signals helped teams consider the future, their connection to daily project decisions often felt abstract—helpful in theory, but difficult to apply practically.
Recognising this gap, the Country Office set out to build a clearer bridge between foresight and implementation. Through three workshops, the team piloted a stress-testing process on its Circular Economy portfolio— linking emerging signals to specific interventions within the portfolio’s three pivots. In doing so, they moved foresight from the realm of the conceptual to the practical— providing tools to inform decisions, challenge assumptions, and improve strategic alignment.
What emerged was not just a refined portfolio, but a renewed sense of what foresight can be: a practice that is rigorous, grounded, and accessible—even to sceptics. A way of working that doesn’t compete with programmatic priorities, but sharpens them.
These workshops really changed how people viewed foresight. By directly linking trends and signals to the practical challenges that colleagues were facing in projects and portfolios, the workshops made foresight feel less like an abstract strategic exercise and more like a concrete way of working.Tum Nhim, Head of Solutions Mapping at UNDP Cambodia Accelerator Labs
The Process: Stress-testing the Circular Economy Portfolio
The Circular Economy (CE) portfolio in Cambodia is structured around three strategic pivots: enabling government leadership, nurturing circular business and market growth, and cultivating conscious consumers and citizens. Each pivot is anchored in a core intent—ranging from strengthening the state’s capacity to champion CE reform, to mainstreaming inclusive business models, to fostering public awareness and engagement.
The first phase focused on a targeted horizon scanning effort, which has already become second nature to the Cambodia CO. Beginning with an initial horizon scanning workshop in 2021, followed by a series of sense-making and scenario-building exercises throughout 2022, the CO developed its new Country Programme Document (CPD) for 2024–2028 with a distinctly futures-oriented lens. This journey culminated in the development of a Foresight Playbook tailored to the CO’s context—offering tools and prompts to embed strategic foresight across project cycles and institutional workflows.
After collecting over 80 new signals, the team clustered them into themes and trends through sense-making exercises. First, they prioritised themes relevant to the Cambodian context and then, they introduced a second dimension: the degree of uncertainty. Assessing signals and themes across both these dimensions enriched the dialogue about forces shaping the future—those we understand and can plan for, and those with ambiguous implications.
By classifying themes along these two axes, the team could differentiate between “known certainties” that required immediate strategic alignment and “relevant uncertainties” that warranted more flexible, anticipatory responses.
The Relevance-Uncertainty matrix to identify the more critical but still uncertain themes
Each intervention was assessed for how directly it addressed each theme that emerged— using a green, yellow, or red traffic light system.
The next phase involved mapping the Circular Economy portfolio against the “relevant and certain” trends. This step helped identify blind spots and challenge the portfolio's logic. Each intervention was assessed for how directly it addressed each trend— using a green, yellow, or red traffic light system.
This participatory mapping revealed critical insights. For example, in Pivot 2, the team found significant private-sector skepticism about circular business models. In Pivot 3, it highlighted the need to embed CE into consumer consciousness, distinguishing it from other green initiatives.
The final step, wind-tunnelling, pushed the team to confront uncertainty directly.
They explored two plausible future outcomes for each relevant but uncertain theme. For example, would the private sector adopt circular business models under supportive regulations, or would investments stay hesitant despite policy support? Would consumer concern for plastic pollution grow, or be overshadowed by urgent issues like food insecurity and water scarcity?
Each intervention was then examined against these divergent futures. Could it succeed under both of these extreme outcomes, or would it need to adapt? If adaptation was necessary, what signals should be tracked to determine which way the theme might unfold
Even though a roadmap of planned interventions was already in place for each of these pivots, the stress-testing process created an opportunity for deeper reflection, prompting the team to revisit, refine, and in some cases, fundamentally rethink their design choices.
Outcomes & Impact: From Reflection to Redesign
This series of workshops proved both intellectually demanding and deeply generative. It illuminated not just risks, but also points of resilience.
Pivot 1: Enabling Government Leadership
Insight
When the team mapped interventions under the first pivot, a critical theme emerged: although there was growing enthusiasm for Circular Economy principles, a stark capacity gap within public institutions remained. The risk was clear. Without adequate in-house expertise, the transition could stall at the policy level, leading to regulation that was either delayed, ineffective, or poorly enforced. Horizon scanning also highlighted a cautionary pattern observed elsewhere: when regulation was introduced without sufficient consultation or public preparedness, it sometimes faced backlash from industry or citizens.
Action
This insight led the team to recognise the urgent need for a better understanding of the underlying motivations and interests of different stakeholders.
Pivot 2: Private Sector Engagement and Market Growth
Insight
The second pivot—centred on private sector engagement—surfaced another nuanced challenge. The signals collected raised questions about the real-world viability of Circular Economy business models and whether the ecosystem—financial, regulatory, and technical—was equipped to support their transition.
Action
Rather than abandon ambition, the team reframed their approach. They recognised that evidence speaks louder than advocacy. If private sector buy-in was essential, then proof points were needed—demonstrations of what works, under what conditions, and with what trade-offs. The roadmap was therefore restructured to prioritise ideation, prototyping, and incubation of circular business models. These would serve both as vehicles for innovation and as platforms for building confidence in the economic promise of circularity.
Pivot 3: Conscious Consumers and Active Citizens
Insight
The third pivot focused on the role of the public—not just as beneficiaries, but as drivers of change. However, the foresight process revealed that while climate change and environmental issues were gaining visibility, the specific value proposition of the Circular Economy remained poorly understood. There was a real risk that CE would be conflated with generic green initiatives, diluting its distinctiveness and undermining the effectiveness of communication campaigns.
Action
These reflections informed a strategic rethinking of planned interventions, ensuring that the portfolio supported both circular and green transitions. Communication strategies were recalibrated to better distinguish CE from broader environmental narratives, while outreach efforts were repositioned to emphasise practical, relatable entry points for the public.
While the technical outputs of the stress-testing workshops were significant—new insights, reprioritised interventions, and strengthened portfolios—the most powerful outcomes may have been less tangible yet more enduring. For many colleagues in the Country Office, this was the first time foresight felt truly accessible. In contrast to earlier horizon scanning exercises, which had helped develop a shared future-consciousness at the programme level, their influence on daily work at the project and portfolio levels often remained implicit—absorbed rather than applied. This time, something shifted.
By directly linking trends and signals to the practical challenges that colleagues were facing in projects and portfolios, the workshops made foresight feel less like an abstract strategic exercise and more like a concrete way of working. Colleagues across the office, particularly those deeply engaged in programmatic delivery, began to view foresight not as a parallel function managed by the Accelerator Lab, but as a toolkit for making better decisions in real time.
“These workshops really changed how people viewed foresight,” noted Tum, Head of Solutions Mapping at the Accelerator Lab. “Six months later, I was in a meeting with government partners, and to my surprise, it was our economist colleagues—the ones who are usually more inclined to the rigour of quantitative methods —who brought up the foresight stress-testing tools. They said the tools are very practical, structuring qualitative insights in a way that made them usable for government partners. That was a big moment for us. A small win, but one that showed just how deeply this approach had landed.”
As teams engaged in mapping the initiatives across the three pivots—government leadership, private sector transformation, and consumer engagement—they also began to see the invisible threads that wove these efforts together. What initially appeared as discrete domains soon revealed themselves as deeply interdependent. This systems view—amplified through the stress-testing and wind-tunneling exercises—offered more than just design improvements. It became a source of strategic clarity.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
“For me, one of the biggest shifts was confidence. Seeing how different pivots connect—and how those connections influence outcomes—has transformed how I discuss the work. And this clarity has been instrumental in my resource mobilisation efforts. In conversations with donors, I can now articulate how specific outcomes—like addressing marine waste—cannot be achieved through isolated interventions. That systems insight helps build trust and opens new possibilities for partnership.Nac Mi, Portfolio Leader for the Circular Economy portfolio
This strategic coherence—linking insights from foresight to the pragmatics of pitching and partnering—highlights the broader value of embedding futures thinking into development portfolios. It is not just about planning better; it is about communicating more convincingly, aligning more deeply, and ultimately, delivering more impact.
Learnings & Next Steps
Throughout the process one of the key learnings that emerged was that there is a need to actively counter bias during the entire exercise. Horizon scanning can easily become a box-ticking exercise if the team only focuses on known and local signals—policy dialogues, donor priorities, and sectoral needs already in play. This risks reinforcing existing assumptions rather than challenging them. For future iterations, the team considered designating a “Red Team” responsible for identifying counter-signals and emerging disruptions from regional and global contexts—ensuring that the foresight process doesn’t become a mirror of what we want to see but a window into multiple possible futures.
Additionally, special care needs to be taken in facilitating this discussion. As can be expected, teams are often inclined to rationalise any red flags that pose questions to interventions that they have so carefully designed. Introducing gamification—framing the task as “the team that can find the most red lights wins”— can prove helpful in shifting the mood towards proactively looking for opportunities to enhance previous work instead of feeling the need to defend it. It also highlights the critical role that foresight plays in creating space for self-reflection and constructive critique.
Going Forward: Shifting Mindsets and Building Capacity
Looking ahead, the Cambodia Country Office is exploring ways to build on the momentum sparked by this process. There is a growing appetite to institutionalise this stress-testing methodology—not only as an annual or biannual practice for the Circular Economy portfolio, but also as a framework to be applied across other priority portfolios within the office. The ambition extends beyond internal use.
The team sees potential in sharing these tools with government counterparts, as the approach is practical and accessible. The team envisions this methodology as a stepping stone—both to deepen anticipatory capacity within UNDP and to support partners across various sectors to demonstrate that the future is not on some distant horizon, but is already shaping the choices we make today.
“Foresight can sometimes feel abstract, or even a little too conceptual for people who work with data, plans, and operational decisions. What this process showed is that it doesn’t have to be. When foresight becomes a way to stress-test real initiatives, it suddenly becomes useful. And once it’s useful, it becomes empowering.”Vannarioth Sok, Head of Experimentation at UNDP Cambodia Accelerator Labs
