Fredy Vargas Lama, PhD ‘Beyond Foresight: The Rise of Anticipatory Governance’

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Fredy Vargas Lama, PhD. He’s a renowned senior consultant and advisor in long-term strategy and foresight, focused on government transformation and foresight-informed policy design.

His career has taken him from economics and corporate risk into government, where he became Peru’s national director for foresight and long-term vision, before moving into academia, consultancy and international foresight networks. 

A central theme that he covered in our conversation is the development of futures thinking in Latin America. Fredy argues that long-term planning was historically constrained by political perceptions. The greatest barriers today are institutional and cultural. Governments frequently lack structures encouraging officials to think beyond electoral terms; long-term initiatives are abandoned when administrations change, which makes sustained action particularly difficult. 

Fredy also distinguishes anticipatory governance from conventional foresight. Rather than simply exploring possible futures, it links anticipation directly to decision-making, embeds future-oriented thinking continuously within institutions, and builds policymaking and public administration around a future-facing perspective. The objective is therefore institutional capability rather than simply better forecasting. 

Our discussion also included the OECD and World Economic Forum, whose value Fredy sees in connecting int’l expertise, generating multidisciplinary perspectives and enabling those advising govts and major organisations to exchange ideas about emerging technological, geopolitical and societal change. He also highlights the need for a renewed social contract capable of supporting societies through profound change. 

Philosophy has an important role here: he argues that futures thinking should reconnect with deeper questions about time, society and humanity rather than concentrating excessively on methods. Finally, our conversation concluded with a three-level challenge...