Anticipatory Action in Advance of "Wicked Crises"

Governments and aid agencies have had promising results with anticipatory action — support offered when a crisis is predicted but before it develops. These experiences have been in straightforward crises, where trajectories are predictable, the scale of the crisis is limited, and where technical solutions are reasonably well identified. 

Anticipatory action is increasingly being promoted in what could be called ‘wicked crises’, such as that occurring in the Horn of Africa in 2020–2022. In addition to being protracted, more severe and on a wider geographical scale, such crises are also much more complex. Analyzing how crisis-affected people take their own anticipatory action seemed to offer a way to understand how support can best be offered as crises threaten, and what are the windows of opportunity for doing so. 

In 2020, the Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC) research program used the advance warnings of a possible drought in Somalia to track and analyze how crisis-affected farmers and pastoralists take proactive steps to protect their livelihoods and assets. The study sheds light on how Anticipatory Action interventions can best be offered as crises threaten, and what the windows of opportunity are for doing so. The report draws on panel interviews with Somali pastoralists and farmers, and a series of roundtable discussions with key stakeholders working in the region, to provide lessons for Anticipatory Action in the context of future ‘wicked crises.’

Key Lessons

Limited economic opportunities curtail Somalis’ abilities to take proactive steps to protect livelihoods and assets when crises are forecasted. This restricts the potential for Anticipatory Action interventions to achieve impact at scale, and highlights the need for greater investment in longer-term adaptation and resilience. Increased investments in resilience today mean more effective and scalable opportunities for Anticipatory Action ahead of future crises.

The current crisis took diverse trajectories in different parts of Somalia. Support for a wide variety of strategies or programming cannot best be organized and managed as a single Anticipatory Action instrument with a single funding mechanism and one common trigger in the context of ‘wicked crises.’ Anticipatory Action frameworks must continue to work towards solutions for delivering contextualized assistance. Leveraging existing long-term resilience programming to deliver Anticipatory Action interventions is a promising option for doing so.