Creating an Enabling Context

The Challenge

Right now, businesses have an urgent need and opportunity to transform why they exist and how they operate. They need to shift from focusing on maximising short-term profit to driving long-term social justice and regeneration. But there's a problem: businesses are operating within an economic system that's not conducive to this transformation. Unless our current economic systems and structures - which have led to mounting inequalities, environmental degradation, and resource depletion - fundamentally change, business transformation will be held back.

The good news? Change is possible if businesses step up to help influence, rethink and reshape our economic structures. This includes intellectual property rights, corporate tax regimes, limited liability legal entities, the global financial structure and more.

It sounds daunting, but we must remember that economic systems are not determined by 'natural' laws. Instead, they are created by us; our collective decisions, assumptions and mindsets. This means we have the power to reshape them to create a just and regenerative economy.

Our Approach

Forum is collaborating with key stakeholders throughout the market ecosystem, such as financial institutions, regulators and civil society organisations, who influence the actions, goals and incentives of businesses.

Together, we will redesign instruments and structures that stakeholders across the economy use to make decisions, such as the corporate disclosure and accountability frameworks that hold businesses to account. In doing so, we will build the capacity of these actors to embed systems thinking in their work and tools.

Examples of Our Work

Forum brings a unique blend of futures and systems thinking. We innovate and collaborate. Recent initiatives include:

Partnering with Aviva Investors and the School of System Change to launch the first-ever School of System Change in Finance. The programme equips financial changemakers with systems change tools to tackle complex macro-finance challenges.
Facilitating the merger of two coalitions to create the Taskforce for Inequality Related Financial Disclosures, which aims to develop a systemic risk management framework that can reduce inequality created by the private sector.
Protein Challenge Southeast Asia, through which we’re exploring how financial actors can drive the transition to a just and regenerative protein system.
The North Star Transitions: Regenerative Finance Lab, a unique collaboration between investors and businesses to identify and work towards creating a regenerative market economy and system.

What Our Partners Say

“The complex challenges facing the world today - inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, among others - require holistic solutions that are co-created through multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary approaches. But navigating discussions with diverse stakeholders who bring different lived experiences, learned experiences and worldviews, and finding interconnections and common ground, is difficult work. I’ve been consistently impressed with Forum for the Future’s design and facilitation skills which guide such stakeholders through co-learning and co-design, opening pathways for shared solutions.” - Delilah Rothenberg, Executive Director, Predistribution Initiative

Get in Touch

Interested in influencing the bigger picture by reshaping the wider operating context in which your business sits? Get in touch with Charlie Thorneycroft, Senior Change Designer, to explore more.

Latest

Can hydrogen bring about true transformation of our energy systems?

Growing interest in hydrogen’s potential as an alternative to fossil fuels has been rising. But does hydrogen, as an energy carrier, support our most hopeful imaginations? In this blog we examine whether hydrogen's development and deployment represent innovation or familiarity.
Project Funding Finance and Operations Manager
Advancing climate justice: A call to action for businesses

Explore the insights from The Business Guide to Advancing Climate Justice, co-published by Forum for the Future and B Lab U.S. and Canada, with reflections from Ksenia Benifand, American Climate Futures’ Program Director.
Shape Just Transition Pathways

There are a multitude of decarbonisation solutions and many technically possible pathways to achieving net-zero, but there is a risk that some pathways will be incremental and others may perpetuate harm to people and the planet. We enable change actors in the energy system to navigate the evolving energy landscape that is being driven by innovation in energy technologies, business models and government policy.

The Five Capitals - a framework for sustainability

The Five Capitals Model provides a basis for understanding sustainability in terms of the economic concept of wealth creation or ‘capital’. Any organisation will use five types of capital to deliver its products or services. A sustainable organisation will maintain and where possible enhance these stocks of capital assets, rather than deplete or degrade them.
Jobs

We are a growing organisation and we are regularly on the look out for new recruits to join our teams around the world.
For a just and regenerative future

Forum for the Future is a leading international sustainability organisation running out of offices in the UK, US, India and Singapore.
Growing our Future US

Working together to accelerate the transition to a just and regenerative agriculture system in the United States.
Sustainability and system change

Climate change, malnutrition, inequality, poverty, ecological degradation. The global challenges we face are so urgent and tricky that we need a solution to match their scale and complexity. This is where system change comes in. We use systems thinking to understand the web of interrelations that create complex problems, anticipate unintended consequences, and identify how and where to take action to meet the SDG goals.
What is Net Positive?

We reinvent strategies for a 1.5°C world. Our Net Positive approach helps business put back more into society and environment than it takes out. Unilever’s pioneering commitment to eliminate fossil fuels from its operations and directly support the generation of more renewable energy than they consume was driven behind the scenes by Forum.
Transport or Mobility: What’s the difference and why does it matter?

Recently, the word transportation is being replaced with mobility. Why is this happening? What’s the difference between them? And why should we care about this change?
Become a system change agent

Learn more about upcoming system change programmes and express your interest.
6 ways Unilever has achieved success through sustainability - and how your business can too

A year ago this week, Unilever launched its Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), one of the most ambitious strategies that a global company has ever embarked on. Pioneering a bold new business model, the company pledged to double in size at the same time as halving its environmental footprint.
Transforming the Purpose of Business

More and more businesses like are setting ambitious targets for positive impact on their operations, value chains and wider operating context. For more than 25 years we have partnered with businesses to navigate this complexity and design impactful solutions that deliver the deeper change that’s needed. Why not get in touch to find out more?