Rights to a future. Why and how not to assume development needs

Project period: 2020-2023; resuming in 2027 

Global development institutions often treat the future as a universal horizon of obligation, prescribing what communities should aspire to become. Yet marginalized communities mobilize the future on very different terms, from asserting political agency (“there are Natives in the future”) to reclaiming economic narratives (“Africa is the future”). This project investigates the conceptual foundations and methodological implications of these competing futures. Working with, training and learning from researchers, foresight practitioners, and activists, I examine three core insights:

1. The history of colonizing the future coexists with long-standing, non-colonial traditions of critical futures thinking (see Bourgeois et al. 2022, Feukeu 2024).
2. Development and foresight practices can be ethical only when they avoid presuming the needs of the communities they aim to serve (Alpes et al. 2023).
3. Once needs are not assumed, alternative methods—such as reframing (Feukeu 2025), participatory diagnosis, and situated futures (Feukeu 2024)—become available for social-scientific inquiry.

Future work will extend this agenda to economic rights, especially property and land rights, through a critical account of the political economy of Africa.

Literature