Governing Before the Crisis: Strategic Foresight, Anticipatory Governance Capacity, and Public-Sector Resilience in an Era of Polycrisis
Keywords:
interorganizational coordination, administrative flexibility, public value, public-sector resilience, strategic foresight, Polycrisis, anticipatory governanceAbstract
Climatic, economic, health, geopolitical, technological, and social disruptions are becoming relevant and intertwining in a Polycrisis environment in which public administrations are operating across institutional and territorial boundaries. While strategic foresight and anticipatory governance are often suggested as solutions, research is still not very well developed to provide an explanation on how knowledge about possible futures can be translated to resilient administrative action. This conceptual paper elaborates on a model linking strategic foresight capacity, interorganizational coordination, anticipatory governance capacity, administrative flexibility, public-sector resilience, public-service continuity, citizen trust and public value. The article proposes that there is no automatic performance effect of foresight, as it is is useful only if it is converted within an architecture that makes distributed intelligence coordinated, authorized, experimental and adaptive action. Administrative flexibility also supports the process of building in anticipatory governance capacity and public-service continuity is the visible link between resilience and citizen trust and public value. Eight propositions serve as a model's causal logic and boundary conditions. The article's contribution is to identify how Polycrisis differs from multiple crises, to bring together future-oriented and crisis-oriented public-administration literature, and to shift the focus on continuity as a product of operations and as a democratic statement of the reliability of government.
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