Applications open for free online short course in “Anticipatory Governance: New ways of sense-making and navigating for uncertainty”
The Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST), in partnership with USAID’s Resilient Waters programme in Southern Africa, has re-launched their free online short course called “Anticipatory Governance: New ways of sense-making and navigating for uncertainty”. The self-paced course is available for free on the UNESCO Open Learning platform until 31 January 2024.
Drawing on the expertise of CST’s researchers in the fields of foresight and futures literacy, social-ecological resilience, and complex adaptive systems, this self-paced course highlights the approaches and tools for exploring how to foster governance capacities to explore, envision, and plan for change and uncertainty. It introduces the concept of anticipatory governance as an approach for dealing with complexity and future uncertainty, by governing in the present in a way that is adaptive to or can shape uncertain futures.
This online course first launched in 2021, with 1 000 learners from 38 countries registering for it. Aimed at practitioners, researchers, and managers, this course identifies key participatory foresight and futuring tools that can improve decision-making and the governance of complex systems. Case studies from southern Africa showcase the ways in which these tools have and can be applied to co-design desirable visions of the future and to identify the diverse pathways for navigating towards socially just and sustainable futures.
The course is presented by experts in futures and foresight, resilience and complexity thinking, and takes about eight hours to complete. It is free and can be done at the participants’ own pace.
Course facilitators
Tanja Hichert, futures and foresight practitioner, and UNESCO co-chair in Complex Systems and Transformative African Futures at Stellenbosch University
Prof Rika Preiser, senior researcher at the CST and UNESCO co-chair in Complex Systems and Transformative African Futures at Stellenbosch University
Prof Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs, co-director at the CST and SARCHi chair in Social-Ecological Systems and Resilience
Dr Joy Waddell, learning and design coordinator, and research associate at the CST
To start your learning journey and explore new ways of navigating for uncertainty, enrol at
https://shorturl.at/amFGX.