The main aim of the project is to produce comprehensively researched possible futures or scenarios for the main CCIs as a whole in South Africa, as defined by UNESCO and discussed in the SACO 2022 Economic Mapping Report.
Scenario planning has played a starring role in South Africa’s political, social and economic development, starting with the High Road/Low Road scenarios developed for the Anglo-American Corporation and made famous by corporate strategist and author Clem Sunter in the 1980s (though preceded by secretive apartheid government “futures thinking” exercises).
The Anglo-American Corporation’s “The World and South Africa in the 1990s” scenarios, with its starkly contrasting futures, originated within the corporate sphere before being presented widely across the country. It is acknowledged to have had some influence in persuading key figures in apartheid South Africa to pursue a negotiated settlement rather than a continuation of conflict and civil war. The Nedbank/Old Mutual scenario planning exercise and then the landmark Mont Fleur Scenarios, both focusing on the economy, followed in the uncertainty of the early 1990s before the democratic elections. In more recent history, the Presidency of the SA government launched its “South Africa Scenarios 2025: The future we chose?” in 2008 and the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) in 2018 the “Indlulamithi South Africa Scenarios 2030”.
The Mont Fleur scenarios in particular stand out both because of their apparent success and obviously different method.
In the Mont Fleur exercise, compared to what seems to have become standard practice, the exercise originally produced seven scenarios, which were then whittled down to four. These four were, according to the chief architect of the scenarios Adam Kahane: Ostrich, Lame Duck, Icarus, and Flight of the Flamingos:
A wide ranging publicity campaign involving among others a video and a 16-page insert in the alternative newspaper The Weekly Mail was an integral part of the scenario process so that the names of the four scenarios became part of common parlance - at least among the literate and perhaps privileged population. Nonetheless, it is hard to evaluate the immediate effect. One extensive study judges the scenarios had , apart from the impression on the influential participants “limited direct impact” in South Africa. Yet the Icarus scenario did not eventuate and fiscal conservatism persisted, though the contending views of the need for greater spending by the State did not vanish.
A contrarian view of the Mont Fleur scenarios and the fight against what was seen as the threat of macro-economic populism is that the economic orthodoxy the scenarios subscribed to have caused long-term problems. Greater redistributive spending – along with redistribution of economic opportunity – may have shifted South Africa from its stubborn path of inequality and poverty contrasting with conspicuous consumption by newly enriched elites and lessened the temptations of crime and corruption.
