Pagtanaw 2050: For bets and voters

Despite the bitter experience with the “three to six months” time frame that President Duterte promised within which to eradicate the problems of drugs, crime, and corruption, the people are ready once again to latch on to a new set of grand promises by the politicians. This dangerous lack of situational awareness is what “horas de peligro” conjures, the Spanish being more frightful than the Filipino.

We need to temper our expectations of the next six years, 2022-2028. Frustratingly, we may not even be poised to hire the best candidate to clean our Augean stable of a nation.

We need purposive “political calming” conditions and mechanisms, an effort to de-escalate political passions, much of which has already gone beyond the point of rationality and civility.

I had these thoughts when I finally saw the document output of Pagtanaw 2050, a national foresight project that the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) initiated through the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST).

This project was undertaken by the members of the NAST, of which Dr. Rhodora Azanza is the president. The project director was Dr. William Padolina, former secretary of science and technology. This effort required the engagement and inputs of over 350 individual eminent scientists, academics, experts, and professionals, in a series of capacity-building and foresighting workshops.

It is interesting that the foresight document is entitled “A Prosperous, Archipelagic, Maritime Nation.” Pagtanaw 2050 is about harnessing the talent and tools in science and technology to innovate toward a prosperous, archipelagic, maritime nation by 2050. This does not require much elaboration on what our scientists see to be the geopolitical and economic trajectory of the prosperity of the nation.

The idea of “foresight” is arguably a major watchword in how we should plan the trajectory of the Philippines. It is an antidote to the universal “bahala na” syndrome. Foresight is “… the application of systematic, participatory, future intelligence gathering, and medium-to-long-term vision-building processes to informing present day decisions and mobilizing joint actions. It brings together key agents of change and various sources of knowledge in order to develop strategic visions and anticipatory intelligence” (European Commission).

The other idea for “taming” the Philippine future is “science.” The Pagtanaw 2050 quotes J. Farrar (2022) approvingly: “And I don’t just mean vaccine development. I mean social sciences, biomedical science, immunology, virology, mathematical modeling, economics. You can’t just build that science when you think you need it: investment in people, teams, and infrastructure over years provides the bedrock that is so important in a crisis.”

Pagtanaw 2050 is a masterful document. It looked into the following operational areas: the blue economy, governance, business and trade, information and communication technology, science education and talent retention, food security and nutrition, health systems, energy, water, environment and climate change, shelter, transportation, and other infrastructure, and space exploration.

Pagtanaw 2050 has put the collective minds of the most scientific and experienced minds in the country to produce provocative and disruptive ideas in neat bundles: an integrated science, technology, and innovation roadmap; an environment, climate change, and space exploration cluster map; a food, nutrition, and health cluster map; an energy and water cluster map; and a build environments cluster map.

The Pagtanaw 2050 document consists of 360 pages in seven sections. We need to bring this out with a flourish so our journalists can give it the prominence it needs for the presidential candidates to want and to need to read it. What the nation needs now, as we enter the homestretch of the electoral campaign, is to deepen the conversation about our future.

This nation would be better served if some of the time for debates is reserved for our scientists asking thoughtful, incisive questions of our presidential candidates in an atmosphere of appreciative inquiry and civil conversation, as the people watch and listen with awe and admiration for the scintillating ideas, insights, and innovations that could transform their future.

The crowning achievement of DOST Secretary Fortunato dela Peña should be to make this Pagtanaw 2050 available—in English, Filipino, Cebuano, and Ilocano—as a required reading for every voter in the May 2020 elections.

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