Why Pakistan Must Institutionalise Foresight: A Call to Break the Cycle of Crisis Management

For two decades, I have devoted my career to a single, burning question: why does Pakistan, a nation blessed with immense talent and unwavering faith, remain trapped in the cycle of reacting to crises rather than shaping its own destiny? I built the Pakistan State of Future Index (PK-SOFI) to measure our standing against long-range indicators. I have observed the disciplined foresight of the National Intelligence Council, the OECD, the UK Cabinet Office, and South Korea's Parliamentary Caucus. And every time I return to our beloved homeland, I am confronted with the same stark reality: we are a nation organised for emergencies, not for trajectories.

Why Does Foresight Fail to Take Root in Pakistan?

The honest answer is not a lack of talent or awareness. It is that foresight is not a step in how our budget is drafted, or how a ministry decides its priorities. There is no standing government body mandated to scan horizons and feed the results into policy. Instead, we see a series of one-off exercises and donor-funded pilots that surface, produce a report, and vanish without ever touching a real decision. We are a nation that has taken 25 IMF bailouts since 1958, spending a meaningful share of nearly every decade negotiating short-term fiscal survival rather than long-term fiscal design.

Layer onto that a security environment that has run hot almost continuously: three wars with India, the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, a three-decade counterinsurgency, and a live conflict on our western border. Add floods on a generational cycle, most recently in 2010 and 2022, and governments that rarely complete a full term. Together, these have made firefighting the default posture. It is not that our officials lack the capacity to think ahead; it is that the in-tray never empties long enough to look past it. In a system permanently in triage, the patience required for foresight reads as indulgence.

The Bureaucratic Barriers to Long-Term Planning

Bureaucratic incentives punish the very posture foresight requires. To do this work honestly, one must say, 'here are four ways this could go' instead of 'here is the plan.' In other systems, that honesty signals rigour. Here, it is perceived as weakness. A civil servant who hedges looks unsure in a system that promotes manufactured certainty. So departments flatten their outputs into single forecasts dressed up as inevitabilities, because that is what survives a briefing.

Devolution without capacity is devolution in name only. After the 18th Amendment, the provinces formally inherited planning authority, but there is no actual infrastructure of foresight to devolve: no standing data systems, no trained analyst cadre, no dedicated budget lines. We handed provinces a mandate without a matching capability, because the capability was never built centrally either. I see this starkly in how differently Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan engage with long-range planning, and how peripheral AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan remain from national foresight conversations altogether.

What Other Nations Do That We Do Not

Other systems show it can be done differently. Singapore's Centre for Strategic Futures sits inside the Prime Minister's Office, government-budgeted, training civil servants across ministries. Finland's Committee for the Future has sat inside Parliament since the early 1990s; by law, every government must present its view of the country's long-term future. The UK runs a standing Horizon Scanning Programme, South Korea's National Assembly has its own futures institute, and the UAE folded foresight into a cabinet-level portfolio in 2016. Wales created a statutory Future Generations Commissioner with legal power over public bodies.

Even China and the US, opposite in ideology, share this discipline. China's Five-Year Plans form a standing apparatus surviving every leadership transition, while the US National Intelligence Council has delivered its Global Trends report to every incoming administration since 1997. None of these systems run on champions or grant cycles. They run on statute, budget, and a permanent seat inside government. That is exactly the combination Pakistan has never assembled.

The Path Forward: A Fixed, Funded, Legal Place for Foresight

What ties all of this together is a single pathology: our governance architecture has almost none of the feedback loops that let a system self-organise around long-term signals. Self-organising systems need memory, actors with a stake in outcomes beyond their own tenure, and a mechanism that rewards anticipation over reaction. We have built none of those into the state's core operating logic. Foresight keeps arriving from the outside, as a consultancy or a donor project, and keeps failing to fuse with the host, the way a graft fails when the underlying tissue cannot support it.

An institutionalised foresight function would not eliminate the crises that keep Pakistan in triage; floods, currency shocks, and security shocks are not going away. What it would change is the state's posture going into them. An IMF program negotiated against standing 10-year fiscal scenarios looks different from one negotiated cycle to cycle. A flood response planned against decade-tracked climate projections looks different from one improvised after the water reaches the villages. A federation with shared foresight infrastructure would let all six administrative units argue about the future on the same data and time horizon, instead of improvising six separate responses to the same pressures.

None of this requires inventing something new. It requires borrowing the discipline that Singapore, Finland, the UAE, Wales, China, and the United States have each built, and giving foresight the one thing it has never had here: a fixed, funded, legally protected place inside how decisions actually get made. Until then, Pakistan will remain a country that occasionally produces foresight but never practices it as policy. Our nation, with its rich history and unshakeable faith, deserves better. We must build the future we envision, not merely react to the one that arrives.