The Global Scenario Group, forerunner of GTC, introduced a simple and widely used “taxonomy of the future” to organize the wide array of possible global futures into three broad channels—Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions.
Conventional Worlds are governed by today’s dominant forces of globalization: economic interdependence deepens, dominant values spread, and developing regions gradually converge toward rich-country patterns of production and consumption. Conventional Worlds scenarios remain dominant but are generating social and ecological crises they cannot solve, undermining their long-term viability. In these scenarios, a reliance on markets and policies to tweak the deep causes of unsustainability—reckless economic growth, consumerist culture, and a state-centric world order—becomes perilously insufficient.
Barbarization explores the real risk that Conventional Worlds strategies prove inadequate for countering such mounting environmental and social stress, and hence problems spiral out of control, leading to a general crisis and the erosion of civilized norms.
Great Transitions examine worlds that transcend reform to embrace new values and institutions in pursuit of a just, fulfilling, and sustainable civilization. In the context of today’s converging crises, a turn toward a Great Transition becomes both a burning necessity and, if a movement surges to make it happen, a historic possibility.
The scenario taxonomy considers two variants each for Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions, a total of six visions (see image below).
The world today is a mixture of all these different scenarios with different tendencies dominant in different places. The following figure suggests the broad global trends of the last quarter century: persistence of Conventional Worlds and strengthening of Barbarization. Looking to the future, as Conventional Worlds dominance recedes, the fateful uncertainty is whether Barbarization or Great Transitions will fill the vacuum.
