Issue Lessons from Singapore for linking Korean foresight to decision-making

Summary

Korea is paying attention to building futures research capacity for emerging issues, but how organically to connect it to policy decision-making remains unresolved. The first lesson the author draws from the Singapore centre is strategic placement, since locating it under the Prime Minister's Office is less an administrative convenience than an institutional declaration that preparing for the future is a core state function. The second is ecosystem thinking, as the centre helps each ministry build its own capacity and acts as a hub for connection and learning rather than trying to be the single source of answers. The third is continuous methodological evolution, because its scenario toolkit is an evolving framework rather than a finished tool. For its fifteenth anniversary the centre published a section in which 15 current and former colleagues imagined that another world, language or science is possible. The author sees cultivating, inside government, the courage to imagine seemingly impossible possibilities as the essence of the centre's work.