The UAE’s Playbook for Futures Literacy—From Vision to Daily Practice

If you want to see futures literacy operating not as a side project but as the operating system of government, study the United Arab Emirates. In 2016, the UAE launched the UAE Strategy for the Future, a whole-of-government roadmap that made future-readiness a mandatory part of how ministries work. It spelled out sector prototypes, scenario reports, capacity building, and—crucially—required every federal entity to appoint a Director of the UAE Strategy for the Future to drive the agenda. That structural move turned foresight from “nice to have” into job descriptions and performance indicators.

To back the strategy with process and infrastructure, the government created a formal Future Foresight Strategy and a national UAE Future Foresight Platform, a digital hub for tools, training, and knowledge-sharing that embeds foresight into planning cycles. The UAE also partnered with the World Economic Forum to host multiple editions of the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils, ensuring that global expert networks feed directly into domestic policy sense-making.

Institutionally, futures literacy is championed from the center. The Government Development & the Future Office, led by Minister of State Ohood bint Khalfan Al Roumi, is tasked with boosting agility, building new government models, and scaling future skills across the civil service—essentially, keeping the system future-fit rather than running one-off exercises.

On the experimentation front, the UAE set up the Ministry of Possibilities, a virtual, time-bound ministry that incubates teams to tackle “impossible” cross-government problems with design, rapid prototyping, and citizen co-creation. It’s an explicit policy lab for leapfrog solutions and a cultural signal that ambiguity and iteration are expected, not exceptional.

Dubai has built a public-facing ecosystem that turns foresight into a social capability. The Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) runs the Dubai Future Forum—billed as the world’s largest gathering of futurists—at the Museum of the Future, convening hundreds of thinkers to stress-test assumptions and swap methods. DFF’s Dubai Future Academy delivers open courses like “Foundations of Foresight” and multi-day programmes on scanning, scenarios, and road-mapping, so foresight becomes a skill people practise, not just read about.

Importantly, the UAE links its national push to global capability building. In 2020, DFF and UNESCO announced a Futures Literacy Hub in Dubai to scale UNESCO’s participatory futures methods—Futures Literacy Laboratories—across regions. That partnership anchors the UAE’s local investments inside a recognized international framework for teaching people how to “use the future” to see the present anew.

Put together, this is what leadership in futures literacy looks like: a national strategy that rewires roles and routines; platforms and training that make practice repeatable; experimental structures that reward learning; and international linkages that keep methods current. In the UAE, foresight isn’t a report—it’s a muscle the state and society are actively building.