For a small country exposed to demographic, technological, economic and geopolitical change, strategic foresight should not be an exercise in predicting Latvia in 2050. Its value lies in making today’s decisions more robust when the future refuses to follow the plan.
Latvia is unusually fond of long horizons.
Strategies describe 2030, 2035 and 2050. Demographic projections extend decades into the future. Economic models estimate convergence. Climate scenarios describe changing conditions. Ministries define targets and trajectories.
All of this is useful.
But a long-term target is not the same thing as thinking seriously about the future.
A plan can extend to 2050 while remaining based almost entirely on assumptions inherited from 2026.
That distinction matters.
Latvia is making long-lived decisions about education, infrastructure, defence, energy, public services and human capital while some of the assumptions underlying those decisions are becoming unusually unstable.
We don’t know precisely how artificial intelligence will alter professional work. We don’t know whether demographic decline will continue along existing trajectories or interact with migration, automation and changing settlement patterns in unexpected ways. We don’t know what Europe’s security architecture will look like twenty years from now. Nor can we confidently predict the technologies, industries or skills on which Latvia’s competitiveness will depend.
The appropriate response is not to stop planning.
It is to become better at planning when we know that some of our assumptions will be wrong.
Foresight is not prediction
This is where strategic foresight is often misunderstood.
It isn’t primarily an attempt to describe what the future will look like.
The OECD defines strategic foresight as a structured exploration of plausible futures intended to improve decisions in the present. Its methods include horizon scanning, megatrend analysis, scenarios and backcasting. The objective is explicitly not to identify a single predicted future.
That changes the question.
A forecast asks:
What is likely to happen?
Foresight also asks:
What else could plausibly happen, and what would that mean for the decision we are making now?
The difference can seem academic until a system experiences a discontinuity.
A demographic projection might reasonably describe the most likely population trajectory. But a strategy built around it should still ask what happens if migration changes substantially, longevity increases faster than expected, AI reduces labour demand in some occupations, settlement patterns shift, or geopolitical developments alter population movements.
None of these alternatives needs to be predicted.
They need to be considered.
Latvia has already experimented with this
Foresight is not entirely foreign to Latvian policymaking.
The OECD has already worked specifically with Latvia on anticipatory innovation governance. Its 2023 review examined how foresight, experimentation and anticipatory approaches could be incorporated into Latvian innovation ecosystems and government decision-making.
That matters because the difficult part is rarely generating scenarios.
Governments can commission studies. Experts can identify megatrends. Workshops can produce plausible futures.
The harder question is what happens afterwards.
The OECD describes an impact gap between producing knowledge about possible futures and actually using that knowledge to change government decisions. Anticipatory governance requires foresight to connect with experimentation, policy design and ordinary decision-making rather than remaining an isolated analytical exercise.
This is particularly relevant for Latvia.
A foresight report that accurately identifies a future risk but changes no decision has limited institutional value.
A less sophisticated exercise that causes a ministry to reconsider an investment, test an assumption or preserve an option may be considerably more useful.
Small countries have a particular reason to care
Latvia cannot control many of the forces shaping its future.
It cannot determine the direction of global AI development.
It cannot set European interest rates.
It cannot independently determine the security environment of Northern Europe.
It cannot reverse European demographic trends by itself.
And its domestic market is too small to insulate it from technological and economic changes elsewhere.
That could be interpreted as a weakness.
For foresight, it creates a different imperative.
When the ability to shape an external trend is limited, the ability to anticipate its consequences and adapt earlier becomes more valuable.
Smallness can also reduce institutional distance. The people responsible for different parts of a system are often only a few relationships apart. Problems that require years of coordination across layers of government in larger countries can, at least in principle, be discussed around the same table in Latvia.
The constraint is therefore not necessarily scale.
It is whether the system can recognize change early enough and translate that recognition into action.
The future rarely belongs to one ministry
Many of Latvia’s most important long-term questions don’t fit neatly inside administrative boundaries.
Consider demographic decline.
It is simultaneously a question of labour supply, education, healthcare, pensions, regional development, housing, migration, productivity and public finances.
Or consider artificial intelligence.
It touches education, labour markets, regulation, public administration, economic competitiveness, language policy and national security.
Climate adaptation, energy transition and societal resilience have the same characteristic.
The administrative system divides these problems because government needs responsibilities.
The future does not.
Foresight becomes useful partly because it allows a problem to be examined before it is divided into institutional compartments.
A weak signal in education may have consequences for the labour market.
A technological development may create a regulatory problem.
A demographic shift may make an infrastructure assumption obsolete.
The analytical value lies in connecting those dots early.
Signals are not forecasts
This is also why weak signals matter.
A signal is evidence that something may be changing.
It might be a new behaviour, an unusual policy response, an emerging technology, an unexpected data point or a contradiction between what institutions assume and what people are beginning to do.
Most signals will not become transformative trends.
That is not a failure.
The purpose of signal monitoring is not to collect predictions that later prove correct. It is to expand the range of developments an institution is capable of noticing.
For Latvia, this distinction is important.
A small analytical system cannot study everything in equal depth. But it can systematically identify developments whose consequences would be unusually large if they accelerated.
The relevant question becomes:
If this signal became a major trend, which assumptions in our current strategy would stop working?
That is much more useful than asking whether the signal will definitely become important.
Explore signals relevant to Latvia by clicking here!
Scenarios should put strategies under pressure
The same principle applies to scenarios.
A scenario is not useful because it provides a compelling story about Latvia in 2050.
It is useful when it changes how we evaluate a decision in 2026.
Suppose Latvia is considering a policy that works well if labour shortages continue, economic convergence proceeds steadily and European integration remains broadly stable.
Now put that policy into several different plausible environments.
What if automation reduces demand for some categories of labour while increasing shortages in others?
What if migration becomes substantially more important to maintaining the workforce?
What if defence spending remains structurally higher for decades?
What if energy becomes much cheaper because of technological change?
What if regional inequality grows even while national GDP rises?
The objective isn’t to select the correct scenario.
It is to discover which policies work only when our preferred assumptions are true.
Those are fragile policies.
Foresight should create dilemmas
There is another reason to explore multiple futures.
Long-term policy disagreements are often presented as disagreements about evidence when they are actually disagreements about trade-offs.
Efficiency may conflict with resilience.
Rapid technological adoption may conflict with accountability.
Concentrating services may improve quality while weakening territorial accessibility.
Migration may alleviate labour shortages while creating new integration requirements.
Automation may increase current productivity while weakening traditional pathways through which future expertise is formed.
Better evidence doesn’t make these tensions disappear.
Foresight can make them visible earlier.
That allows strategy to move beyond lists of desirable outcomes and confront the choices that appear when not every objective can be maximized simultaneously.
A useful long-term strategy therefore doesn’t eliminate dilemmas.
It identifies which ones society may eventually have to resolve.
The institutional test
The strongest foresight system would not necessarily produce the most reports, scenarios or workshops.
A better test is whether it changes institutional behaviour.
Does horizon scanning influence what government monitors?
Do scenarios change policy design?
Are major investments stress-tested against alternative futures?
Do ministries identify assumptions behind long-term targets?
Can weak signals trigger deeper investigation?
Are policies designed with options that can be expanded, reversed or adapted as uncertainty resolves?
And when an unexpected development occurs, can the government identify which existing assumptions it invalidates?
This is the transition from foresight as an analytical activity to anticipatory governance.
OECD work on governments increasingly emphasizes precisely this problem: foresight becomes consequential when it is embedded into decision-making, experimentation and institutional learning rather than operating as a parallel futures exercise.
Latvia 2050 is not the destination
A strategy called Latvia 2050 inevitably creates an image of a distant endpoint.
But 2050 should probably be understood differently.
It is a device for looking back at today’s decisions from far enough away that their hidden assumptions become easier to see.
The purpose isn’t to describe Latvia on 1 January 2050 with increasing precision.
It is to ask whether decisions made today remain sensible across several versions of the country that could plausibly exist by then.
Some assumptions will prove correct.
Others will fail.
Unexpected technologies will appear. Political priorities will change. Crises will interrupt trajectories. New opportunities will emerge from developments that currently seem marginal.
No foresight system will remove that uncertainty.
Nor should it try.
The real measure of a future-ready institution is not whether it predicted what happened.
It is whether being wrong was something it had prepared for.
Leave a Reply