This innovative initiative emerges from the realization that public sector institutions need to be at the forefront of futures thinking. Today, global transformation phenomena are impacting us faster and faster and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Anticipating these changes requires multi-stakeholder collaboration and the integration of collective intelligence to imagine possible futures. Thus, the public sector needs to dialogue with academia, civil society and the private sector to incorporate long term capabilities.
Latin America has gone through a series of waves in its process of institutionalization of strategic foresight. The institutions dedicated to designing long-term strategies in different countries have suffered ups and downs in terms of political, economic and social support. This project seeks to tackle this instability with a flexible form of institutionalism at the international level that may help to overcome the linear and short-term logics of government cycles.

Currently, the network's driving group has created a map of institutions with foresight capacities in the region and agreed on the network´s objectives. It is now working on setting up the internal governance system and defining the integration mechanisms to rapidly expand and include more members. In other words, the initiative is in its incipient phase of implementation.

In the near future, the Network plans to hold an annual face-to-face meeting among all its members and capacity building activities

In principle, the Network has been defined as one that promotes the diversity of epistemic and methodological approaches to futures thinking. In this sense, its structure will be governed by principles such as horizontality, inclusiveness, co-creativity, agility, situated and systemic thinking, public-private collaboration, intercultural and intergenerational dialogues, among others.

Members of the Network:
Argentina: Leticia González (INTA)
Brasil: Rosa Alegría (Millennium Project/WFSF)
Chile: Consejo CTCI; CChPE; ILPES/CEPAL; CMPC; Memética; Ministerio de Medio Ambiente; Ministerio de Energía; Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores; Ministerio de Defensa.
Colombia: Lucio Henao (ProSeres)
Ecuador: Jean Paul Pinto (Laboratorio de Imaginación del Futuro)
México: Mauricio Hernández (APF); Abril Chimal (JFS/CENTRO).
Perú: César Santivañez (Future Fiction Magazine)

The direct beneficiaries are its members, who will be able to exchange knowledge and experiences, while gaining international visibility and thus a stronger capacity to influence decision-making processes in both the public and private sectors. However, indirectly, society as a whole will also benefit from the future-proofing of policies and decision making from the public sector and the possible public-private collaboration schemes that can be nurtured by strategic and long-term perspectives.

Since its launch, the Network has attracted much interest from different communities and pre-existing academic alliances in the region. Qualitatively, this articulation initiative stands out for its openness in terms of types of members (not only targeting academic profiles and university programs, but also public institutions and companies) and epistemic approaches from which to address the future (integrating quantitative and qualitative perspectives, as well as the work being done from the arts and humanities).

In the near future we hope that this network will become an inclusive community representative of the diversity of future studies in Latin America. By the same to become a relational reference in these topics from the region.

The greatest challenge posed by the ideation and implementation of this Network is to articulate very diverse interests intrinsically linked to the character of each of its members. In this sense, the work of the Network cannot compete with the work carried out by its members, nor can it aspire to replace them. At the same time, it must be sustained over time without becoming a rigid and bureaucratic institutional structure. Finally, the availability of human and financial resources to sustain the initiative will depend on the solvency and commitment of its members, or on international funding sources that decide to support the initiative.

One of the necessary conditions for the success of an initiative such as this one is undoubtedly that its governance scheme allows the emergence and support of internal leadership to generate roadmaps and guidelines for the coordinated action of its members. In this sense, leadership roles have to have the capacity to articulate and coordinate diverse actors coming from different sectors of society, cultures and even countries.

Secondly, as we mentioned earlier, the availability of human and financial resources is always a challenge in this type of self-managed networks, since it will depend on the solvency and commitment of its members and/or on the support of external alliances.

This initiative has not yet been replicated elsewhere. Instead, it can be considered a replication of other similar initiatives that already exist or have existed in the past among Latin American countries. In this sense, the Latin American Future Network hopes to learn from past experiences as well as becoming a platform for the visibility, exchange and strengthening of existing sectoral initiatives.

We have confirmed the realization that, today, it is extremely urgent and necessary to collectively build a strategic and forward-looking vision in order to promote a development model that restores the natural balance between the quality of life of people, economic activities and the protection of biodiversity.

Having strategic guidelines and systemic thinking are seen as necessary conditions to guide the approach towards uncertainty. Strong anticipatory capacities would allow us to take a proactive - and not only reactive - attitude towards the opportunities opened up by new technologies and knowledge, in addition to facilitating continuous learning, risk prevention and multi-stakeholder collaboration.