Anticipatory governance

Anticipatory governance, or anticipatory profiling, is the practice used by the state to collect information and data about its citizens in order to assess events or behaviours in a predictable manner based on the knowledge gathered. Anticipatory governance is also a method of decision making that uses predictive measures to anticipate possible outcomes to then make decisions based on the data provided. Anticipatory governance is a system of governing that is made up of processes and institutions that rely on foresight and predictions to decrease risk and develop efficient methods to address events in their early conception or prevent them altogether.  

Anticipatory governance is a concept that has been derived from terms of similar meaning, like forward engagement and forward deployment, which was a primary focus for decisions made by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). More recently, anticipatory governance has become data oriented practice which allows citizens and governments to utilize data as contributions and evidence for decision making regarding various matters within society. For example, Finland has a Finnish parliamentary Committee for the Future, which takes advantage of foresight to predict and evaluate the impact of developments to the country.

Since 2001, the Millennium Project has initiated a project entitled the State of the Future Index, has been using a predictive methodology to foresee the future for global countries based on historical data, variables and indicators, such as GDP, annual population, literacy rates, population, and unemployment.

Anticipatory governance is a system with four components. They allow the system to: use a foresight, have a networked system that integrates foresight and policy procedures, receive feedback in order to improve efficiency and knowledge, and allow for flexibility. By allowing for feedback, anticipatory governance can detect and assess the development of future programs and policy. Feedback can be done trough audits, and assessments of performance. The anticipatory system must adapt to consider possibilities that result from he data and may appear to be untraditional to allow the system to be effective and depend on pragmatic data.

Anticipatory governance utilizes various techniques to assess society which can evaluate the continuous information from knowledge based technologies, such as machine learning. Anticipatory governance also takes into consideration that the concept cannot predict the future certainly, however, it can account for several possible future avenues. In order to determine these possible avenues the following list of indicators are required: "aggregated averages, risk assessment, sensitivity analysis of factors or decisions driving the scenarios, identification of unacceptable scenarios or worst cases, and assessment of common and different impacts among the scenarios."

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