Foresight Brings Transformation to UNHCR North Macedonia

Monica Sandri saw a glimpse of the future. It began when Sandri, the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) North Macedonia Representative, was tasked with realizing the ambitious vision of supporting the gradual shift in the Western Balkans from a region of irregular transit to one that offers meaningful protection and viable solutions for refugees and asylum-seekers.

“It’s such a big, beautiful vision, and the right vision, but I remember thinking, ‘This is such a big endeavor, we are tasked with making lasting change on a regional level, this is not something that one agency can achieve alone,’” she says. “We need to mobilize everyone because there are so many implications in this vision — so many pieces that need to come together and for that we need a strong position and capacity to engage.”

That’s where Sandri feared UNHCR could fall short, given that the organization is used to working in silos, narrowly focused on its mandate, and planning one year at a time. She felt strongly that not only would a transformation into an effective, future-fit operation require a longer-range view, but also a broader engagement with other UN agencies, non-traditional partners within civil society, government, outside experts, and refugees.

To have a greater impact, she knew UNHCR must expand its strategic playing field and add more pieces to the board. That means looking further into the future than usual and exploring many more opportunities and venues of engagement. To that end, the North Macedonia operation decided to experiment with strategic foresight.

“By doing the same old things, we will not realize our vision,” Sandri says. “Rather than our tendency to take progress in small steps, we would have to do many things very differently — to realize our vision we need to consider all possible events, risks, and opportunities that may emerge in the future, but whose signals can be seen today.”

This, she says, was the concept that led her to submit a proposal to UNHCR’s Innovation Service to reimagine the overall design of the North Macedonia operation. If it worked, she believed it could be a blueprint for the “Country Office of the Future” — not only to be successful, but to remain forward-thinking even once the future arrives. Sandri knew it would require widespread collaboration, systems change, and a participatory culture shift that would upend traditional bureaucratic structures, both within UNHCR and across North Macedonia. The Innovation Service agreed the idea had merit, and began collaborating with the North Macedonia operation in 2019 to systematize strategic foresight in the operation and rethink what a country operation could be. Their work so far has uncovered valuable strategies that would benefit not only the North Macedonia operation but others across UNHCR.

Changing norms to prepare for the future

Simply put, foresight is a way of looking at long-term improvements that includes disrupting the current status quo. Sandri and other team members, including Petar Dimitrov, Innovation and Transformation Lead, and Aarathi Krishnan, Strategic Foresight Advisor, soon realized that systematizing foresight to improve planning uncovered the need for broad organizational transformation.

“What was initially aimed as a way of refining and extending our situation analysis compelled us to reframe our values and rethink our priorities and approaches out of pure necessity to be more effective in realizing our vision,” Sandri says. “Change cannot be compartmentalized, so to be future-fit, we have to be open for a fundamental transformation to the way we work based on the commitment to look forward and be prepared while fostering participation, curiosity, courage, efficiency, and cooperative relationships.”

Ultimately, their goal is that by 2030, “UNHCR North Macedonia will be a brave, forward-looking, agile country office, at the forefront of innovation, engaging a diverse range of actors to drive towards sustainable development and an inclusive society, where all refugees are protected, and no one is stateless,” according to their vision statement.

The kinds of large-scale changes that were needed to create an anticipatory, highly networked, inclusive, participatory model of how the country office works couldn’t possibly be achieved by looking at one year at a time. As Sandri says, it’s necessary to look 10 or 20 years forward to be a truly future-focused operation. The team conducted foresight research and experimented with a wide range of possible scenarios for the operation of tomorrow.

“Foresight wakes us up from the inertia of business as usual,” Dimitrov says. “It gives us the space to reflect in a collective and intuitive way, devise novel approaches, and spark transformation.”

He says it’s important to attune the senses — physical, emotional, and digital — to signals from the future, understanding their implications, planning accordingly, and remaining flexible enough to change course if needed. Dimitrov elaborates by explaining that individuals and teams must be alert to what’s happening on the ground, to catch possible indications of what the future might be like by being attentive to what people say, what’s encountered during work, what they read online, and more. In addition, this should be a daily process, with time allotted to make sense of these inputs: How might these potential signals of change impact UNHCR’s work and the people it serves? It’s equally important to rely on emotion and intuition, to both collect and interpret this information. For example, at the start of COVID-19 while speaking with a health expert, the team in North Macedonia was told everything would be just fine — but the expert’s body language said something very different, signaling trouble ahead. Finally, given the large role digital content and connections play in our lives, it’s essential to be mindful of the information that comes to us, especially as most of us tend to curate the content and influencers we want to see, and attune that “sense” as well.

For example, the team saw a global trend of decline in trust in traditional institutions such as governments, NGOs, and media. This, coupled with the growing power of the public to influence policy, is a clear indicator for UNHCR to increase its engagement locally and with grassroots movements. At the same time, UNHCR must support government counterparts in rebuilding trust through participatory and forward-looking governance.

Another example is the trend of an aging population and emigration of people in search of work that threatens to leave countries in the Western Balkans struggling with labor shortages. This challenge could actually be an opportunity for UNHCR to shift the narrative around refugees and position them as actors of development and sustainability.

Population movements will shape the future as global mobility is expected to accelerate exponentially, a trend that has to be embedded and integrated into planning. “North Macedonia needs third-country nationals to want to come and stay; the future is all about who can attract more people and create better conditions for them to remain in their country,” Sandri says. “Foresight provides an objective way to start the debate and begin changing something.”

Through foresight and anticipatory governance, it’s much easier to identify the deep-rooted kinds of problems that UNHCR needs to solve to be successful. Of course, protecting and assisting people of concern is vitally important, and often takes place in real time. But by looking further into the future than UNHCR tends to do today, it’s possible to “catch more opportunities in the net and mitigate risks,” as Sandri says.

Driving transformation requires people and participation

Sandri and the rest of the team involved in this initiative believe the necessary changes can’t come only from headquarters, although support from the organization’s top leadership is essential. They must also happen locally, at the point of delivery. It’s where the solutions are found and the future is created.

Dimitrov, who has documented the entire transformation process to share with other country operations, emphasizes how crucial it is for everything to be interconnected — the work of UNHCR, the involvement of the country’s government and people, and the engagement of people of concern — for the vision to succeed.

According to Dimitrov, foresight can be used to see where an operation is and where it needs to be. From there, it’s important to work as a single organism to move toward that goal. “Foresight is a tool to navigate uncertainty, but it will remain a mental exercise if operations or teams don’t have the means to move.”

For example, country operations have people with a variety of different backgrounds, levels of education, and life experiences. The whole point of a participatory strategy is to involve everyone, which brings value because it harnesses the diversity among UNHCR staff. The same is true about people of concern, whose personal experience can be a pivotal pathway to new ideas and solutions. The goal is to continue moving toward an institutionalized operational design that allows the time and space for everyone to contribute to long-term, sustainable solutions — a place where everyone wants to stay and be engaged.

“It really comes down to the involvement of individuals,” Dimitrov says. “There are open-minded, creative people, and sometimes the organization is too rigid or hierarchical for them to stay. So we either transform or risk losing this talent.”

Sandri believes that inclusion, diversity, and participation is what’s needed for UNHCR to be agile and make better decisions. She admits that fostering participation is resource-intensive. However, she sees the value in getting more people engaged and empowered, and moving toward co-creation, which is essential for large-scale change, within UNHCR and across society.

“Having trust and freedom to assume responsibility is crucial; it’s a key value in our new strategy,” Dimitrov says. “We strive to value trust, loyalty, and self-management over hierarchy.”

With learning and scanning systematized, UNHCR North Macedonia is already putting the team’s learnings into action in daily operations. The operation is supporting the introduction of foresight in the North Macedonia National Migration Policy 2021–2025 and cooperating with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on advocating for a collaborative and future-oriented National Development Strategy 2021–2041 for North Macedonia.

By supporting a nationwide transition toward long-term, participatory, and forward-looking planning, UNHCR will ensure that people under the mandate are empowered to provide meaningful contributions and effectively shape national priorities and policy. In parallel, the transition will open discussions on long term challenges for the country, such as the declining population, and position refugees as development actors.

“It’s not just talking about what a perfect workplace should look like,” Sandri says. “You have to walk the talk. We have fantastic people in North Macedonia, and it didn’t take them much time to convert because the courage to take risks and experiment with new approaches for the common goal was already within them.”