Working in partnership with Local Trust, Global Dashboard editors Alex Evans and David Steven have created four Long Crisis Scenarios: The Rise of the Oligarchs, Big Mother, Fragile Resilient, and Winning Ugly. For Scenarios Week on Global Dashboard, we’ve asked leading thinkers to share their responses to these scenarios, along with their own thoughts about what our shared COVID future might hold.
Last month, we launch the #LongCrisisScenarios in partnership with the Local Trust. The four scenarios describe COVID-19 futures where the response is polarised or where collective action predominates, and where decision-making is centralised or distributed. For the past week, we’ve been inviting contributors to share their perspectives on a what COVID-19 future might look like. From education to cities, from citizenship to future foreign secretaries, you’ll find all the articles here.
What path we take post-COVID-19 will depend in large part on how the world’s cities change. The Long Crisis scenarios are a timely and helpful reminder that nothing is settled: our future is up for grabs. A better future can only be won by equipping and empowering cities to drive a green, inclusive recovery post-COVID-19.
We have known for generations that our old models of leadership are not fit for purpose. A once in a multi-generation pandemic offers a global leadership control experiment and we’ve seen what we like, and what we don’t. The winners are rising to the top – the losers are showing the limitations of their Big Men style.
Yesterday afternoon, representatives from the Long Crisis Network, Local Trust, and The Alternative UK came together to explore the implications of the Long Crisis Scenarios for the future of communities.
The Long Crisis Scenarios are a tremendous gift to us all. Considered and calm, they offer a way to make sense of events that can otherwise seem so great in magnitude that, for myself at least, there is a real risk of feeling completely overwhelmed. But more than that, in the form of the Winning Ugly scenario, in particular, they offer both a call to action and a reassurance that action can and will be meaningful.
Scenarios for our post-COVID future kept coming up in discussions over at the Red Button Club. So we teleported ourselves into the year 2030 and took a seat at the desk of a recently retired foreign secretary, getting ready to pour his/her heart into an honest end of the year op-ed.
On 28 February, Lebanon confirmed its fourth case of COVID-19, closing all schools with immediate effect on the same day. Fadi Yarak, the Director General of Education in the Lebanese Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE), shares some lessons from over a decade of leading a school system through difficult times.
To think through the changes we need to make, it makes sense first to try to understand the new landscape, even as it is still unfolding. To help answer that question, we asked Alex Evans and David Steven, founders of the Long Crisis Network, to develop some scenarios, each describing a different future that could emerge from the events happening around us now.
Today, we’re kicking off Scenarios Week, a week of articles from leading thinkers who have formed their own responses to the Long Crisis Scenarios, perspectives on what our world might soon look like, or insights on how we can prepare for an uncertain future.
If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad? No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...
Official development assistance (ODA) – or aid – is a small but conspicuous pillar of the international order, and its frailties are being exposed by COVID as surely as those of the other foundations of this order. The assumptions underpinning aid and its management...
Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown,...