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Anticipatory Policy Skills: Shaping governance in a complex and interdependent world (STG-MA-FCM-APS)

STG-MA-FCM-APS

Description

Every policy is a bet on the future. A carbon tax, a drug approval, an AI regulation, a pension reform, each one assumes how the world will unfold, and what will still hold true years from now. Yet policymaking itself is rarely anticipatory: those assumptions are usually left implicit, untested, or just inherited from the past, rather than examined and stress-tested on their own terms. Doing this well is a craft in its own right, with its own concepts, quality standards, and discipline of judgement.
This course is structured to do this in three layers.
Tools. You'll learn to scan for emerging signals, build and stress-test scenarios, and map a decision's second- and third-order consequences, and just as importantly, know when a piece of future-oriented evidence is solid enough to act on.
Institutions and politics. Tools alone don't make anticipation work. What matters is who is allowed to anticipate, whose version of the future counts as legitimate, and how that knowledge gets embedded, or ignored, inside real institutions. It's also political, because it involves contested visions of the future, unequal power, and decisions that affect people who don't get a say in making them.
Personal skills. Foresight forces judgement calls when the evidence runs out and a decision still has to be made. A dedicated component led by Prof. Ruth Rubio Marín builds the inclusive leadership and emotional and cultural intelligence to navigate disagreement and lead well under genuine uncertainty.
Wherever you’ll sit in the policy process, inside an administration or will work to shape one from outside, you will increasingly be expected to commission foresight work, or defend it, or even judge its quality. For these reasons, the course is built around doing. Midway through, you'll test the tools yourself and get direct feedback from the instructor and a foresight expert. It closes with a Peer Review exercise that will be assessed. You are asked to design and defend a foresight process for a real governance problem, you will be graded not only on your group's work, but on how rigorously you evaluate someone else's, because in practice you'll often need to judge anticipation as much as produce it.

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