Publications

Citation

(2002), "Publications", Foresight, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2002.27304cae.001

Publications

Publications for listing in this section should be sent to Graham May, Reviews Editor, foresight, Principal Lecturer in Futures Research, Leeds Metropolitan University, School of the Built Environment, Brunswick Building, Leeds LS2 8BU, UK.

Note: items including a code (e.g. FS 22:8/373) are abbreviated versions of abstracts selected from Future Survey, published by the World Future Society (for more information see http://www.wfs.org/wfs/fsurv.htm).

The Age of Terror: America and the World after September 11

Edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda (Basic Books, New York and the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, 2001, 232 pp., $22.00, FS 24:2/051)

After an introduction on 11 September as "mass murder as performance art", "America's new war against its old allies of convenience", and Osama bin Laden as "the self-proclaimed messiah of what might yet turn out to be the self-fulfilling prophecy of the clash of civilizations", the editors offer essays written as of 1 November on "the principal lessons, goals and caveats that should guide us as we recover":

• •

  John Lewis Gaddis (Professor of History, Yale University) argues that the post-cold war ended with the collapse of the WTC twin towers, "the geographical position and the military power of the USA are no longer sufficient to ensure its security", security now has a new meaning (for which little in our history and even less in our planning has prepared us), and "our foreign policy since the cold war ended has insufficiently served our interests …our power exceeded our wisdom". The era we've just entered is bound to be more painful than the one we've just left, further terrorist attacks are unavoidable, and the antiterrorist coalition is sure to undergo strains and defections.

• •

  Abbas Amanat (Chair, Council on Middle East Studies, Yale University) warns that Bin Laden's message of violence comes as "a sobering reminder of what has become of the Middle East", which cannot be seen in isolation from wider and deeper problems.

• •

  Paul Kennedy (Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies, Yale University) points to many historical examples of well-established nations that received a staggering blow but then scrambled to recover, and warns of US over-reaction and over-extension.

• •

  Charles Hill (Yale University, Hoover Institution), a former US career diplomat, challenges four post 11 September myths: that nothing of this sort has happened before, that we brought this on ourselves by our arrogance, that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that nothing we do can be effective.

• •

  Niall Ferguson (University of Oxford; NYU) comments on clashing civilizations, the new imperialism (the USA as "a mature, and in some respects decadent, empire"), political globalization (and its antithesis of fragmentation), the ever-cheapening means of destruction (11 September may just be a foretaste of far worse to come).

• •

  Paul Bracken (Professor of Management, Yale University) reviews the conspicuous failures of US intelligence and homeland defense, and the need for unanimous international support for prohibitions on dangerous biological/chemical/nuclear exports.

• •

  Maxine Singer (National Academy of Sciences) considers the mobilization of scientific research against terrorism.

Governance in the 21st Century

(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 2001, 217 pp., $20.00, FS 24:2/079)

In the run-up to EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany, the OECD Forum for the Future organized a series of four conferences. This book, based on the final (March 2000) conference in the series, provides three main messages:

1. 1.

   old forms of governance are increasingly ineffective;

2. 2.

   new forms will involve a much broader range of players; and

3. 3.

   vesting initiative exclusively in the hands of those in senior positions looks set to undergo fundamental changes.

Five of the seven essays that follow:

1. 1.

   "Power in the global knowledge economy and society" by Wolfgang Michalski, Riel Miller, and Barrie Stevens (OECD Secretariat) looks at long-run governance trends (more democratic approaches, more quality of life issues, continuous reform efforts, transformed decision-making at an international level, a broader and less hierarchical distribution of the capacity for effective action;

2. 2.

   "Trends in governance" by Daniel Tarschys (Stockholm University) stresses that "the way in which societies are managed affects their mental climate as well as the conditions of economic expansion and social welfare; good governance remains a requisite for many forms of growth";

3. 3.

   "Long-term trends in global governance" by Kimon Valaskakis (University of Montreal) argues that the old assumptions regarding sovereignty, dating back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 are dangerously obsolete; a Westphalia II is needed to overcome the weaknesses of the present intergovernmental system (haphazard architecture, agenda gaps and duplication, rigid decision rules) as we are likely to experience "strong turbulence" in the near future regarding the global financial structure, the global environment, the Internet, biotechnology, epidemics, and international terrorism;

4. 4.

   "Governance with technology" by Perri 6 (University of Strathclyde) outlines the toolkit of e-governance to support policymaking (electronic voting, e-mail complaints, chat rooms for policy makers, problem-structuring tools, expert systems, etc.);

5. 5.

   "A quiet revolution of democratic governance" by Charles F. Sabel (Columbia Law School) suggests that "emergent changes in governance may cohere into a new, participatory form of democracy that can be called democratic exceptionalism", where the role of the administrative center is to define broad projects and fix provisional general standards.

Keys to the 21st Century

Edited by Jérôme Bindé, (Berghahn Books, New York and UNESCO, Paris, 2001, 395 pp., $69.95, www.berghahnbooks.com, FS 24:2/095)

An anthology encompassing UNESCO's series of "twenty-first century talks" and "twenty-first century dialogues", establishing a "world forum for future-oriented thinking" that reflects UNESCO's concern for long-term vision. The brief essays are in five parts:

1. 1.

   "Foresight and uncertainty": Ilya Prigogine on the arrow of time and the end of certainty, and various well-known futurists on the future for the future (Hugues de Jouvenel, Colin Blackman, Pentti Malaski, Eleonora Masini, Peter Mettler, Tony Stevenson, Kimon Valaskakis).

2. 2.

   "The future of the species and the future of the planet: towards a natural contract?", Stephen Jay Gould and Edgar Morin on the future of the human species, migration patterns, aging populations, biotechnologies in a brave new world, chemical pollution, invisible pollution and the decline of male fertility, water resources to 2025, food security to 2050, energy scenarios to 2020, the future of space exploration.

3. 3.

   "The new territories of culture: towards a cultural contract?" A clash of cultures versus cultural hybridization, evolving concepts of the heritage of mankind, the future for minority and threatened languages, the future for literature, passions in the twenty-first century, the future of the visual arts, artificial intelligence, distance education, lifelong learning, the need to reform thinking in twenty-first century, information and networks, a society of the immaterial, the future of the media.

4. 4.

   "Learning to live together: towards a new social contract?" Democracy for the future, women tomorrow, childhood trends and prospects, an action plan for childhood in the twenty-first century, the future of work and of time, urban apartheid versus a third age for the city, the end of utopia versus the birth of new utopias.

5. 5.

   "The world and globalization: towards an ethical contract?" A new social contract for a new phase of globalization, a new form of development, participatory development and the fight against poverty, conflict prevention in Africa.

OECD Environmental Outlook

(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, www.sourceoecd.org, 2001, 327 pp., $65.00, FS 24:1/027)

A 1997 OECD study, The World in 2020, envisaged a new global age of economic expansion, but only if pursued within the context of environmental sustainability. This outlook to 2020 provides an analysis of a credible strategy, with the road to the future identified by green, yellow, and red traffic signals:

• •

  Green lights (proceeding with caution): some major environmental improvements have been registered in OECD countries: decreasing emissions of some air pollutants, reversal of deforestation trends, reductions in point source pollution from industry, virtual elimination of lead emissions and CFCs, more "green purchasing" of eco-friendly goods, more waste diverted to recycling (expected to account for 33 per cent of municipal waste in OECD countries in 2020, up from the current 18 per cent), spread of organic agriculture.

• •

  Yellow lights (additional action needed): increasing water use, meeting basic water quality objectives, understanding of toxic emissions, reliable data on hazardous waste.

• •

  Red lights (urgent needs): over-fishing of oceans ("a clear example"), global deforestation and biodiversity loss (OECD country efforts to improve domestic conditions are insufficient to dominate the global trends), climate change ("under current policies, OECD countries are likely to increase CO2 emissions by a further one-third to 2020" – far from the Kyoto Protocol target of a 5 per cent reduction from 1990 levels), groundwater contamination from agricultural pollution. For each of these "red light" issues, examples of appropriate policy instruments are identified, with potential effects quantitatively assessed where possible.

Chapters provide charts, data, and discussion on demographic and labor force development, global trade and investment, economic development (rate of GDP growth to 2020 is expected to decrease significantly in a number of regions), general drivers and trends of consumption patterns, technological change to 2020, primary sectors and natural resources (agriculture, freshwater, fisheries, forestry, biodiversity), energy, climate change, transport, air quality, households (energy and water use, waste generation), three industries (steel, pulp and paper, chemicals), waste management, human health, environmental democracy, resource efficiency to 2020, institutional frameworks for the environment, and policy packages to address the main environmental problems (with emphasis on subsidy removal or reform, environmental taxes and charges, tradable permit schemes, regulatory instruments, technology development and diffusion, education and public awareness policies, and voluntary agreements).

Productive Aging: Concepts and Challenges

Edited by Nancy Morrow-Howell, James Hinterlong, and Michael Sherraden, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2001, 314 pp., $48.00, FS 24:1/010)

These essays from a symposium of gerontologists at Washington University describe the case for productive aging (the contributions of older adults as workers, volunteers, caregivers, and active citizens have important and underappreciated benefits), key issues (natural versus artificial limits we face as we age, opportunity versus obligation to be productive, meaningful engagement vs. exploitation), historical perspectives (by choice and necessity older people had to be productive during most of recorded history), policies to strengthen productive aging (as regards employment, volunteering, assistance within families, and education), biomedical and psychological perspectives on aging, views of sociologists and economists, four ideologies of old age (successful aging, productive aging, radical gerontology, and the New Age concept of conscious aging), the political economy of productive aging, and building new institutions.

Of particular interest is the discussion of the Experience Corps, a new national service program launched in 1995, designed to purge the words senior citizen and elderly. (John W. Gardner chaired the advisory board for the project). Marc Freedman, co-founder of the Experience Corps and author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America (Public Affairs, 1999), proposes a new and broader policy initiative inspired by the GI Bill – "a Third Age Bill, or 3A Bill, aimed at enabling the successful transition of vast numbers of aging boomers into new roles strengthening communities and revitalizing civil society". Such a measure might include a new national corps based on existing pilots like Experience Corps (involving 5-10 per cent of the over 55 population over the next decade in areas of high priority), a fund for R&D to stimulate new approaches to involving third agers, a program to promote training to make the transition to second careers, a set of major awards to highlight third age role models, etc. The aging of America is an opportunity to be seized. "The potential payoff from all of this could be enormous."

Report on the World Social Situation 2001

(UN Dept of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York, 2001, 297 pp., $45.00, FS 24:2/065)

The 15th in a series of reports dating from 1952. Chapters cover:

• •

  Major trends. "Disparities in income and wealth are growing in many countries, and the distance between richer and poorer countries is also widening. Many low-income countries have faced deteriorating economic conditions, while in others substantial groups have experienced serious setbacks in standards of living … Globalization is widely perceived as having contributed to uncertainty and setbacks in living standards for many."

• •

  Family. The most striking change is the dramatic reduction in the size of the nuclear family: "in the span of a single generation, the number of children in a typical family has fallen to three in developing and 1.6 in more developed countries, as against six and 2.7 a generation earlier".

• •

  Generations. The generation aged 15-24 is, today, the largest in history; their numbers require large amounts of resources for training and creation of gainful employment opportunities.

• •

  State. "The state is no longer viewed as the omnipotent agent of social and economic development, but demand for its role as regulator and supervisor of the market and other non-state institutions is stronger as the reach of the market extends farther and the number and scope of activities of civil social organizations grow."

• •

  Civil society. Many new groups have come into being, while important traditional actors such as trade unions have decreased their influence and membership worldwide.

• •

  Work. Long-term unemployment remains a major problem, as well as finding work for young people without the social or work skills for entry-level jobs (despite many schemes to tackle the problem); "in a global workforce estimated at around three billion, between 750 million and one billion are estimated as under-employed".

• •

  Food security. Despite progress, "there are still close to 800 million people in the developing world who do not have enough food to eat".

• •

  Shelter. Differences in available space and quality of dwellings are probably the most dramatic manifestations of living standard disparities between rich and poor; housing is a particularly important example of market failure on a large scale; provision of adequate housing in rapidly-growing LDC cities has not kept pace with the need.

• •

  Armed conflict. Over four million people have been killed in the past decade in various conflicts; one million people have been victims of the 120 million landmines buried in >70 countries.

• •

  Violence. It is difficult to assess whether violence other than armed conflict has been increasing or decreasing at the global level; however, there is less tolerance and acceptance of it, and criminalization of violence is being extended to the private domain of domestic violence; despite important gains, violence against women persists, and rape has been increasing in many parts of the world (trafficking in women is now estimated to be in the range of 1-2 million/year).

• •

  Crime and corruption. Organized crime in past decades has taken on "monumental proportions" and the amount of laundered money may be as high as $500 billion/year; corruption seems to be on the increase as a global phenomenon, and has assumed a central place on the international agenda. Other chapters address globalization and equity, markets, education, disparities in incomes and poverty, health, social protection, reducing vulnerability, enhancing social protection, the changing boundaries of privacy, corporate social responsibility, and bio-medical developments and ethics.

Understanding Sarkar: The Indian Episteme, Macrohistory and Transformative Knowledge

Sohail Inayatullah (Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2002, 366 pp., $49.00, FS 24:2/100)

Inayatullah, author and editor of a dozen books on futures topics, provides an extensive analysis of P.R. Sarkar (1921-1990), a controversial Indian philosopher, guru, and activist. "On one level we can boldly state that Sarkar's theory is more creative, inclusive, and holistic than other attempts by macro-thinkers throughout history. Within the Indian context, along with Gandhi, he stands out as the premiere thinker of this last century, if not the past few hundred years." The notion of opposites is central to his metaphysics, and his rationality is grounded in a universal humanism, or "neo-humanism" that has as its goal a consciousness personally considered as blissful, beyond pleasure and pain. To Sarkar, modernity is the irrational, and the rational leads to the spiritual – the maximization of individual and collective "happiness". To create a new culture, a new map of knowledge is required that frames self, society, other, nature, and the transcendental. In 1955, Sarkar began his spiritual organization Ananda Marga (or The Path of Bliss), and a few years later he started Renaissance Universal and the more directly political PROUTist Universal. Until his death in 1990, Sarkar remained active in Calcutta composing over 1,000 songs of the new dawn, giving talks on spiritual life, lecturing in over 120 languages on spiritual and social theory, providing leadership and managing his organizations, and helping to create self-reliant ecological communities. Chapters discuss Sarkar's unique contributions, PROUT strategy (a central element is movements that organize the oppressed), Sarkar in the context of the Indian episteme (the goal of his theory is to create a condition where the physical, social, and cosmic worlds are in harmony), Sarker's theory of history (the classic cyclical historical viewpoint, with the possibility of spiritual and economic transformation allowing an exit from history), Sarkar in the context of other macro-historians, and his social laws critiqued from various positions.

The Water Manifesto: Arguments for a World Water Contract

Riccardo Petrella (Zed Books, London, 2001, 135 pp., $55.00, FS 24: 1/033)

The former President of the Group of Lisbon and Head of Forecasting and Assessment at the EU declares that "the future … will depend less on technological and economic development than on the capacity of human societies to shape and administer certain rules, institutions, and means of action that enable them to live together in an interdependent world". Present upheavals all have as their cause and substance the control of three basic resources:

1. 1.

   money;

2. 2.

   information; and

3. 3.

   water.

Revolutions are needed in each of these domains: an end to the unbridled financialization of the economy and the supremacy of global financial markets, a drive to raise literacy levels and capacities for communication among the greatest possible number of people in each country (to reduce inequalities between "haves and knows" and "have-nots and know-nots"), and a water revolution involving governance of the ownership and management of the principal source of life. The basic meaning of the water revolution is a right to life for all. "The first revolution of the twenty-first century, if there is to be one at all, will concern the rights of life and rights to life." We must guarantee access to life for every human being and living organism, by establishing, locally and globally, sustainable systems of using and conserving the basic vital resources. To do so, we must recognize water as a common global heritage of humanity. Despite many major national and international initiatives taken over the past 20 years, we have not been able to lessen the scale of the water crisis in the world. Reasons for this persisting crisis include unequal distribution of water resources, waste and mismanagement, growing pollution, and population growth.

The world water problem involves three major critical situations: lack of sufficient quantity of drinking water for 1.4 billion people, destruction and degradation of water resources (through pollution, large dams, and high-waste irrigation systems), and an absence of worldwide rules. A world water contract is needed, inspired by two main objectives:

1. 1.

   basic access to water for every human being and every human community (with national and international campaigns to achieve this);

2. 2.

   modifications of existing water laws (or passing new laws), so as to recognize water as a vital common global heritage and the right of people to have basic access to water.

The costs of providing access to water should be met by a pricing system graduated in accordance with use. The priority targets of the contract should be three billion taps by 2020 (to bring the number of people without access to drinking water to zero), defusing water conflicts ("peace through water"), cutting waste, and access to water for 600 of the world's poorest cities with population over one million by 2020.