Family quilts are pieced together with heatmap and rainfall data, folkloric iconography, and children’s drawings. Don’t the best quilts feel so cozy and protective because the squares are sourced from a diversity of textiles, colors, and memories? One small piece of fabric could never make something large or warm enough for all.
Extending this idea to the anticipatory action story, the quilt demonstrates how the best protection is made from many forms of knowledge. In southern Africa, small cooperatives are being reimagined in this way: webs of support and wisdom spanning all the corners of communities, displacing the Western-knowledge hierarchy. This becomes a kind of resilience, one that can wrap around all of us.
In this reimagined factory, all anticipatory actors come to work under one roof. Instead of competing and operating individually in their own buildings, with unsustainably duplicated machines and ideas – oftentimes needing to take credit and get recognition to secure more funding – work is light yet informed by complexity.
In our collective factory, all actors work together, with money flowing in through one entrance before soon flowing out through a wide funnel to maximize community support.
Community members and local-level participants are not relegated to small side rooms or the front-of-the-house visitor shop created just for profits or PR. They are part of the whole factory: helping build it and shape it, participating in every process, and even helping to dictate where funds get funneled.
What if our collaborative spaces for anticipatory action were imagined like a pottery studio? A spinning wheel surrounded by people from every background and knowledge system. Forecasting experts, finance officers, local leaders, peace committees, artists, students, all adding clay and shaping the same pot.
Communities are not invited in halfway through; they are part of the shaping from the start. One of their key contributions is not just data or feedback, but something harder to quantify: the vibe check. This is the human sense that something is shifting. It’s often the earliest perception of risk before it appears in a model or report.
Without this embodied knowledge, no program holds. The vessel cracks. But when that local intuition is centered – when perception and lived experience guide the work – the structure becomes meaningful and the community’s own.
In many places, forecasts and anticipatory intelligence are alive within local arts and culture. They travel through songs, proverbs, and community stories. They come to life in the town square and around communal and family meals.
In Somalia, poets and spoken-word artists carry warnings within their traveling performances. In Ethiopia, radio dramas and local storytellers can spread early warnings faster than most official channels. In South Sudan, women-led peace committees practice preemptive diplomacy, often through story and song.
Anticipation has never belonged only to the technical and scientific institutions and their “experts.” If the arts are already delivering important anticipatory information, how can the anticipatory action community best support these messengers, creators, and teachers?
While houses can be swept away or people may need to walk away from them, ideas of home and community travel with people wherever they go. Our imaginaries travel with us: internal plans for what can be rebuilt and how our new communities might look and feel.
Even children carry entire blueprints in their minds. Given the chance, their ideas for how to rebuild community are often visionary, concrete, and actionable. Engaging them in all phases of anticipatory action can be deeply meaningful on many levels – from the personally therapeutic to the collective resilience building.
Perhaps this is what the future of anticipatory action must focus on: not only lives and livelihoods, but the imaginaries that carry us through loss and change.
Long before the term anticipatory action came to be, communities were embracing its tenets. The village, the informal settlement, and the group on the move have long woven this basket-like resilience around themselves: strands of mutual aid, local governance, intergenerational oral histories, and informal early warnings.
The strength of these baskets lies in relationships, since anticipation happens relationally and is always site-specific. They have often held communities through floods, price shocks, conflict, loss. Yet the word community itself is slippery, used so casually or vaguely in professional spaces that it can lose meaning, even as in real places it remains vivid, lived, and irreplaceable.
Donor programs may add new reeds or grass to the basket, but they are adding to existing handiwork. The work now is not to invent the basket, but to recognize, strengthen, and uplift what is already there.
“Beneficiary.” “Vulnerable population.” “Recipient.” These terms might help channel critical resources to people in need, but they also reinforce the imaginary distance between “us” and “them”: boundaries, barriers, and borders between those who design systems and those who live within them.
This isn’t to dismiss the real challenges we face when trying to eliminate some of these divisions: corruption, limited capacity, competing pressures, and the difficulty of creating truly participatory processes. But if we are serious about re-centering communities, we have to go beyond technical fixes or new frameworks.
We can begin by identifying where our systems resist integrity: habits, incentives, and blind spots that keep change to the superficial and symbolic. An imagination ethic requires a tolerance for discomfort; when anything about our work feels routine, we must be asking harder questions. To do so, we must first see the water we are swimming in – what David Foster Wallace once called the invisible environment of our assumptions.
It’s not a lack of will that keeps many communities in a cycle of crisis → response → rebuilding → the next crisis. It’s also the habits of thought that shape how action is designed. We classify and categorize because boxes make complexity feel contained.
Humanitarian and anticipatory action actors need creative ways to climb out of those boxes, to breathe in a living, adaptive system. Imagine if the same time and energy spent filling donor forms, proposals, and report pages went into listening to local stories, being with students in schools, and walking with people on the move?
One interviewee said, “We would have to restart the past eighty years: unbuild the member state, the UN system, all of it.” Radical, yes. But maybe that’s what courage looks like now: re-defining what “act early” can look like, saying the upsetting idea, and creating altogether unexpected partnerships that can actually enable radically different forms of community support.
Now part of Anticipation Hub lore, practitioners once created their own circus performances. To those in the room, it seemed absurd at first.
But those sessions weren’t meant to shock and entertain. They were part of a necessary shift from anticipatory action as a technical exercise to something more inclusive, creative, and self-aware.
Participants later spoke about how the experience surfaced tensions they constantly face in their work: the unspoken awareness of not always supporting communities meaningfully; the struggle to build trust within project timelines not created for actual relationship-building; and the awkwardness of realizing they are a part of the very systems whose patterns they wish to transform.
Ten years in, anticipatory action is still growing up – “a teenager,” as one practitioner called it – and it’s important we ensure its evolution continues to be centered in the imaginative as much as the procedural.
Could it be that the symbol of this new era of anticipatory action is an… ear? Meaningful change doesn’t tend to come from simplified data stories – the familiar “x number affected” – but from being invited to access the full complexity of lived experience: uncertainty-driven silence that doesn’t get captured in a survey, intangible losses that can’t be measured, and all the deep and real reasons a forecast may go ignored by a family in a vulnerable place.
The hardest communities to hear are not always the hardest to reach – though those, too, often also go entirely unheard. To listen, truly, is to widen the circle of who is heard and how they are heard: in which language? Over what span of time? Who is in the room, and for what purpose?
Are the ingredients in place to create deep connection and sharing? Can we name what those ingredients are?
Imagine if movement through crisis felt like traversing a rainbow: a protective arc carrying people away from danger with dignity and care. Each color, a form of support: data and science, peace committees, community-informed early warnings, social protection, and cultural knowledge. Together, they form a spectrum of care strong enough to make movement safe rather than desperate.
In reality, the rainbow is uneven. Some travel safely and on a whim; others must move through unbelievable danger, stress, and exhaustion. The rainbow’s very exuberance exposes that imbalance. It asks why existence is safe and joyful for some and near-impossible for others.
Anticipatory action, at its best, extends the arc of that rainbow: broadening trust, foresight, and protection to help carry everyone forward, together.
If it has ever truly existed, the link between love and trust in humanitarian work has frayed these last years. Budget cuts, government control, restrictive reporting requirements – local volunteers told what to do but rarely asked what they know.
One practitioner compared it to an Italian saying: “Quando si chiude una porta, si apre un portone” – When a door closes, a gate opens. The closed door, they said, is the old model: systems of compliance and hierarchy. The open gate is anticipatory action, which offers an invitation to begin again, and differently.
In Eastern Africa, that gate is already open. Rainfall data and agricultural knowledge travel in song from village to village. In Western Africa, children are learning to read weather and recognize early warning signs. These are not outcomes of Western-created projects or pilots. They’re examples of anticipatory action carrying on in parallel with the efforts of the international community of practice.
The challenge now is to walk through that gate together: to center communities by letting people lead with what they are already doing, defining their own partnerships and parameters, and let their imaginaries shape what lies on the other side.
Like galaxies colliding, anticipatory action is now about learning to move within irreversible change.
For years, the work revolved around evidence: if only we had better data, clearer models, the right proof, then the world would act. But the real crisis has always been relational. Communities are flooded not because we don’t understand enough, but because the institutions that must act don’t trust one another enough. Funding chains move slower than the seasons they seek to anticipate.
True preparedness flourishes where relationships are slow to grow and quick to repair. Where communities, governments, and responders build trust strong enough to share risk and power. Where funding is not granted with strings attached, but rooted in accountability that flows many ways. Only then can people closest to crisis decide and act on their own terms.
Perhaps the Magellanic Clouds offer a good metaphor. Two galaxies bound by gravity, circling one another as they move toward eventual union. The process is messy and protracted, but in that gravitational stew, new stars are born. So, too, with anticipatory action: creation through relationship.
Nature is not a mere backdrop to our crises, nor just a tool or solution for our recovery. She is a collaborator, a teacher, and the core of who we are.
In this reframing, anticipatory action becomes a relationship of mutual flourishing, in line with the ideas of Robin Wall Kimmerer, rather than one of control. Communities learn to co-adapt with rivers, forests, and skies.
In Oaxaca, floodable parks and constructed wetlands now transform excess into life sustenance: water once “uncontrolled” is now safely filtered before being shared with all in need. During rains, football fields become reservoirs; in drought, the same systems sustain gardens and school systems. In mountain villages, water is captured before it runs off, and children learn by tending the wetlands that clean what they drink.
These are not grand solutions imposed from above, but real, careful, community-led work that recognizes reciprocity as resilience. Anticipatory action, in this light, is a constant participation in the living systems that we are enmeshed in.
Like the systems it seeks to describe, data too long existed in isolation: scattered pockets of information rather than a living system of infinite interconnections. But other ways of knowing have always endured, grounded in reciprocity and belonging.
A leader from a Sahel region disaster management agency articulated that we might be in the midst of a grand shift toward interdependence. While his face was written with the lines of heavy history, he was hopeful. Hope, for him, was not abstract: the conviction that even amid crisis, unity is possible, that care can cross borders, and that survival depends on deeper interdependence.
In this vision, earth and sky merge into one continuum. The sky holds the patterns of hazards and extremes, while the earth is home to the living web of life. Where they meet, belonging replaces division, and protecting the earth becomes not only a technical task but a moral one.
