The Need for Foresight

We are pleased to present Foresight, the Institute for the Study of International Development's electronic publication, and gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canadian International Development Agency, which made Foresight possible.

Given inevitable constraints of the fiscal year framework for development planning, not to mention the day to day rush of project design and implementation, development policymakers and practitioners often simply lack the time to engage in longer term strategic planning. While there is usually a general sense of what they want to see happen 10 years down the line, there is still a need to think more systematically about what should be done today to best ensure those goals are actually achieved. In other words, we need to increase our resources for thinking over the horizon and strive to better understand how to get to where we really want by acting earlier in a more coordinated fashion. Foresight is intended to help meet this need in a novel way, by offering new insights drawn from cutting edge evidence based academic research. Each issue will be dedicated to a single theme, to be defined through a dialogue between academic researchers and the policymaking community. Articles will synthesize current research from the perspective of what we need to think about today in order to achieve our goals 10 years from now. In this way, we hope to create a new nexus between research, policy and practice by disseminating the latest development research in a practical way that is in tune with the priorities of the development community.