How fragility-informed foresight can drive more effective development co-operation

The recent Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Seville laid out the stark challenges facing development co-operation. Consider these trends:

• The OECD’s latest Economic Outlook sees global growth slowing from 3.3% in 2024 to 2.9% in both 2025 and 2026. 
• The most recent OECD States of Fragility report shows that despite increases in fragility – the balance of exposure to risk and the coping capacity available to mitigate these risks – in western countries, the burden of fragility remains increasingly concentrated in the poorest countries,  with 72% of the world’s extreme poor living in contexts exposed to the highest levels of fragility.  
• This means that the poorest countries are not benefiting from global growth. On current trends, the gap between development financing needs to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and available resources could reach USD 6.4 trillion by 2030.
• Meanwhile, current OECD projections show that 2025 will see a contraction of Official Development Assistance (ODA) from OECD Development Assistance Committee members of 9 to 17%, following a 9% drop in 2024. 

Because gaps in development increase global fragility, inequalities and conflict risk, this all calls for urgent action. But proper action and better decision making need to be supported by evidence and analysis. 

With pressure on states to prioritise limited support, cutting through narratives and assumptions with strong analysis based on plausible scenarios will be essential to justify, structure and deliver effective development assistance. To this end, merging the strengths of multidimensional fragility analysis and strategic foresight offers a potentially powerful response.

Strategic foresight – a structured and systematic approach for exploring plausible futures to anticipate and better prepare for change – supports the development of more agile, anticipatory and efficient development strategies, including via AI integration. The analysis of sources of risk and resilience that shape fragility provides a valuable base for foresight models to develop more nuanced scenarios that help make sense of global challenges, megatrends and uncertainties. 

Because fragility analysis is designed to find the connections that matter between different economic, security, political, environmental, societal and human issues, fragility-informed foresight sharpens our ability to anticipate different futures and to rehearse different policy responses. This, in turn, enables more rapid and coherent responses to disruptions. 

The OECD Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy supports this type of anticipatory approach. Other strategic foresight methods, such as Causal Layered Analysis, can equally be adapted to support the sort of profound rethinking of the underlying assumptions that have shaped development policy over the last twenty years. Integrating AI adds valuable speed and scale, enabling the processing of large amounts of data across several dimensions of fragility. This can help identify potential disruptions as early as possible. 

These methods can be used to uncover and address local, regional and global challenges; inform tailored early warning systems; and support targeted peacebuilding strategies and diplomatic engagement. For example, a recent OECD collaboration with the European Investment Bank and European Space Agency is exploring the potential of integrating fragility analysis with satellite images, AI models, and census data, to provide more granular views of subnational fragility, supporting real-time analysis to inform decision making by humanitarian, development and peace actors. Innovations such as these will be essential to respond to the Sevilla Commitment “to strengthen data collection, analytics, vulnerability assessments, and interoperability between government systems”.

Integrating fragility analysis and foresight can fundamentally change how decisions are made, but impact depends on institutions’ ability to act on insights, not just generate them. While development actors often excel at producing data-driven assessments, they rarely have mechanism in place to test and train preparedness for different scenarios or adapt policies in real time. 

OECD research on anticipatory governance underscores this institutional gap, showing that governments and development actors often struggle to simulate responses to complex disruptions, leaving them reactive rather than proactive. Addressing this gap requires both the right tools and cultural shift: embedding adaptive learning practices where assumptions are rigorously questioned, and strategies refined iteratively. 

To support decision on development co-operation, institutions must not only conduct fragility-informed foresight and deploy AI tools for advanced analysis, they must also reform decision-making processes to translate insight into actions. This is especially critical in contexts facing high fragility and conflict where data gaps and volatility require decision-making systems built for uncertainty. 

Here, foresight methods such as red-teaming – where stress tests identify weaknesses – or futures wheels – which map possible scenarios and their ripple effects–can help development actors map cascading risks and rehearse responses. By embedding these practices, decision-makers can better anticipate the potential consequences of their actions in uncertain environments. 

In a period of rapid change and increasing mistrust, the onus is on the development community to reassess or even discard legacy commitments and past thinking. Development finance will remain constrained in the immediate future, so getting the analytics right is central to realising the ambition of the Seville Commitment. 

The integration of foresight and fragility analysis, enhanced by the growing potential of growing AI, can deliver more compelling solutions toward which development finance can be more confidently directed. This can support better delivery of development instruments, improve cohesion and preparedness, and drive efficiency across donor and partner institutions. 

In an era of deep uncertainty, fragility-informed foresight is not about predicting the future – it is about preparing for it.