Making sense of the future: Causal mapping at the Development Studies Association Conference

It was great to be in Bath last week for the Development Studies Association conference. The theme this year, "Navigating crisis: dangers and opportunities in development", felt more relevant than ever.

Steve Powell, James Copestake and Gabriele Caldas spoke on a panel about how development studies thinks about the future. The whole session was getting at a really interesting question: when we talk about the future, how can we be a bit more clear and systematic about our assumptions?

This got us thinking, and for this conference, we decided to try an experiment. Most of our work at Causal Map involves looking backwards; we usually map people's narratives about events that have already happened, like in a project evaluation. But we had a question: could we apply the same methods to map out arguments about the future? This was the first time we’d tried it, and we were keen to see what would happen.

To try this out, we took Michael Albert’s recent book, Navigating the Polycrisis. It's a complex text all about future global challenges. We wanted to see if our Causal Map Workflows software could map its core arguments in a useful way. Even as a first attempt, the results were fascinating. We could test and visualise the core arguments of the text. For example, while Albert’s own diagram shows ‘Crises of capitalism’ and the ‘violence problematic’ as separate aspects of the polycrisis, our analysis of his arguments showed that he links capitalism as an important driver of violence.

We could also flip the analysis around to see where the author saw grounds for hope, revealing the pathways for positive change that were embedded in the narrative by filtering only for positive links.

What we learned is that this approach seems just as useful for exploring future-oriented texts as it is for past-oriented ones. It’s not about predicting the future, of course, but about providing a clearer picture of the arguments someone is making about it. It’s a tool to help explore and test the logic, which felt like a really valuable exercise.

It was also great to hear from the other panellists. Marine Gauthier gave a talk on how anticipatory knowledge is put together in big international organisations, asking who gets to define the risks that matter. And Maurits Ertseen took us through engineering design thinking of water systems and how to account for and adapt to future changes.

For us, the conversations at DSA reinforced the value of this work. As the world gets more complex, we need better tools to help us see the connections, understand the arguments, and, ultimately, navigate the future with more clarity and confidence.