This Practitioners’ Guide to the Future serves as the culmination of the Humanitarian Horizons project, commissioned by the members of the Inter-Agency Working Group and implemented jointly by the Feinstein International Center (FIC) and the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) of King’s College, London. The Guide merges the projections of global change highlighted by four earlier research papers, with the futures perspectives of operational agencies. The result is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.
The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. Launched in October 2008, the project builds on HFP’s analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers, and makes more practical the exploratory futures research conducted under the Feinstein Center’s 2004 Ambiguity and Change project.
This project was funded by a consortium of NGOs, including Catholic Relief Services, The International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Oxfam America, World Vision Australia, World Vision Canada, and World Vision International.
