Governments are increasingly embracing future-oriented techniques and collaboration with people in order to design public services. This is creating services that are flexible and responsive to change and are therefore more resilient and sustainable in the long term.

For example, when Finland wanted to address the disconnect between education and job market needs, it developed Osaamistarvekompassi, or the Skills Needs Compass. This online service uses AI to help the government anticipate future skills requirements that are aligned with needs and job opportunities. The programme brings together diverse stakeholders — including learning and employment services, education providers and anticipatory governance experts — to ensure Osaamistarvekompassi’s sustainability and success in matching the needs and skills of job seekers and employers and to help address unemployment and labour shortages. By providing accessible and user-friendly information about future skills needs, the platform is bridging the gap between education supply and labour market needs, ensuring that tomorrow's workforce is equipped with innovative skills needed for success.

Governments are moving away from simply managing public service obligations and instead are developing public service strategies that anticipate future needs. For example, Ireland created Better Public Services, a whole-of-government strategy to develop public services that meet current and anticipate future challenges while building trust (see Box 2.1). Governments are increasingly aware that top-down, inside-out approaches have limits, particularly in addressing diverse and complex issues. They are using collaboration and co-design, approaches that invite people to work alongside public sector organisations to find solutions.

Government organisations traditionally developed public services to meet stable, predictable and incremental public needs. They often used historical data and current trends to anticipate future needs. For example, an organisation may have used population growth rates and past traffic patterns to plan new public transportation routes. While those planning tools can be effective for incremental changes, they may not account for unexpected shifts in public needs or societal conditions. Therefore, the organisation may not be able to cope with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (Polchar, 2020[22]).

To anticipate and prepare for uncertainties, governments are now working to make their public services more resilient and sustainable. To do so, they are using future-oriented approaches, including strategic foresight. Governments can use a variety of anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms to explore challenges and opportunities, identify and anticipate solutions for different scenarios, and finally co-create strategies or solutions (Tõnurist and Hanson, 2020[23]) (Monteiro and Dal Borgo, 2023[24]). These initiatives aim to make the strategic vision for public services more adaptable and proactive. Norway, for example, developed the “New in Norway” portal, which adopts foresight techniques to ensure integration services are successfully meeting current and future needs of diverse groups of users (see Case Study 1).

Governments are including people in the development of public services strategies; they are asking citizens, businesses, organisations and other stakeholders to share their knowledge and to help develop services. This collective intelligence can help government organisations to better understand real world facts and experiences, identify available solutions, and make more inclusive decisions (Saunders and Mulgan, 2017[25]). Co-design has been successful, for example, in Canada, where the Project Heart gathered people with lived experience (PWLE), researchers, designers and policy analysts to develop a way for engagement in public health to be meaningful. Similarly, in Spain, the Citizen Convention on Mental Health brought together citizens to discuss mental health services and develop a set of recommendations to improve them.

Governments are using participatory and open engagement with citizens to include a range of stakeholders and to test more horizontal decision processes (Boyle and Harris, 2009[26]). Citizen participation has been successful, for example, in the United Arab Emirates, where UrbanistAI is encouraging citizens to co-design public spaces using AI technology. In France and Spain, the online citizen participation platforms Decider Pour Paris and Idea Zaragoza, respectively, are drawing on the collective intelligence of residents for urban public services. And in the United States, NASA is using the radical participatory design approach and is allowing citizens to lead the design of very experimental services (see Box 2.2).

Using co-creation and taking a long-term view, governments can create more resilient and forward-thinking public services. The OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services points precisely to the importance for governments to ensure the proactive adaptation to a fast-changing environment and the anticipation of potential opportunities and challenges (OECD, 2024[27]). Structured public engagement and anticipatory techniques enable a better understanding of needs and services that are equipped for both the present and future. Yet this approach has several challenges. First, administrative silos and structural discoordination can hinder collective efforts to develop shared and forward-looking services. Second, solutions are unlikely to emerge from the lower levels of public administrations without incentives from leaders. Third, these changes to public services are often demanding in terms of energy and commitment.

Good practices for future-proofing public services:

• Efforts at the strategic level must be as broad and inclusive as possible. Administrative structures may need to be adapted to ensure the open and equitable participation of different partners and stakeholders.

• Initiatives that use co-design, collective intelligence or futures techniques cannot be one-off; iterative learning and continuous updates ensure that these innovations have valuable outcomes.

• Leaders must champion the vision and provide the necessary resources and authority to sustain bottom-up engagement and future approaches. High-level endorsement is crucial to ensure the sustainability of these innovations.

Moving to a new country comes with lots of questions and paperwork; it's a moment when newcomers are in frequent and direct contact with the public sector and services of their new country. Providing easy access to answers and facilitating these administrative tasks can not only enhance and boost trust in public information and institutions, but also allow newcomers to integrate into the country’s work and social life more quickly.

The decision to enhance Norway’s integration services came following the Norwegian Government’s Digitalisations Strategy: “One digital public sector – Digital strategy for the public sector 2019–2025”. The strategy prioritises the development of seamless public services around seven key life events, including New in Norway (NiN), led by The Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi).

As part of its Anticipatory Governance approach, the Digitalisation Agency (Digdir) developed a foresight methodology to make life-event services more future-oriented, resilient, and sustainable. This methodology was piloted through New in Norway (NiN).

Co-creation and the broad stakeholder involvement was integral to the development process of NiN. A “Future Gathering” event was organised to better understand the needs of newcomers and gain insight into key external factors shaping their experiences.

Discussions were centred around 13 driving forces and trends which impact migrants and public services serving them (such as digitalisation, the need for new competence, polarisation, etc.). As a second step, areas of low preparedness (blind spots) were identified and used to develop six future personas: asylum seekers; resettlement refugees; family immigrants; labour immigrants; foreign students; and children in need of emergency preparedness in the event of unprepared crises.

These future personas enabled NiN to develop better services, for instance, allowing users to obtain consolidated, quality-assured, and comprehensive information tailored to their situation when accessing the New in Norway website.

By embracing the long-term vision making it easy to be new to Norway, the country was able to respond to the unexpected migrant wave due to the war in Ukraine. Originally anticipating 5,000 immigrants in 2022, Norway instead welcomed approximately 30,000 people that year and 36,000 in 2023. The NiN innovation proved crucial in addressing these challenges, allowing newcomers to access relevant information quickly and supporting them during an exceptionally difficult time.

To evaluate NiN, feedback from people at arrival centres was collected and analysed. These evaluations revealed that the programme successfully addressed newcomers’ needs. Additionally, the analysis enabled the portal to adapt swiftly, ensuring its continued relevance.

Beyond its immediate impact, the NiN portal has made Norway more attractive to international talent. At a time when nations are striving to enhance their competitiveness and modernise their economies, innovations like NiN hold significant potential to attract international talent and meet labour market demands.