How Scenario Planning Can Improve Decisions in Fragile Contexts

The distinction between risk and uncertainty matters. Under conditions of risk, potential outcomes are broadly known and their likelihoods can, at least in principle, be estimated. Under conditions of deep uncertainty, not all relevant outcomes are visible in advance and reliable probabilities cannot be assigned to them.

Fragile settings frequently combine both. Teams may be able to monitor known risks, such as food-price pressures, displacement, political unrest, or climate hazards. Yet, they may still be unable to anticipate how those pressures will interact with shifting alliances, contested authority, informal networks, or a sudden political rupture.

Institutions reduce uncertainty by making interaction more predictable. As formal and informal rules and norms that regularize social roles and relationships, they clarify authority and allow people and organizations to form reasonable expectations about how others will behave. In fragile settings, however, several sets of rules and authorities coexist or compete. Therefore, the challenge is not always that institutions are simply weak. Some may be highly influential but pull in different directions. As the institutional landscape shifts, institutions’ ability to provide predictability declines.

This is why improved risk monitoring, while necessary, is not sufficient. Better signals may show that change is underway. However, they do not automatically tell decision-makers what to do when several plausible futures remain open.

Scenario planning can help bridge this gap. It does not seek to predict the future or identify the single most likely outcome. Instead, teams develop a small number of contrasting but plausible accounts of how the operating environment could evolve, and then examine what each would mean for decisions being considered today.

Therefore, scenarios are not forecasts, nor are they exercises in unconstrained imagination. They are structured accounts built from evidence about drivers of change, actors, institutions, emerging trends, and critical uncertainties. Their practical value lies in comparison. A choice that appears compelling under one future may perform poorly under another. Other choices may remain useful across several different futures. Still others may only make sense if particular conditions arise.

Scenario planning gives teams a form of rehearsal space. It allows them to question assumptions before events do so for them and to distinguish between choices that appear robust across different futures—choices that should remain flexible as circumstances change and choices that should only be pursued if agreed signals point toward a particular trajectory. This does not eliminate uncertainty—but it helps teams make more deliberate choices in its presence.

A 2025 learning exercise involving development practitioners and an anonymized South Asian country case illustrates how this can work. The exercise unfolded in 3 half-day sessions. It first introduced participants to the distinction between risk and uncertainty, the logic of strategic foresight, and the relevance of futures thinking for fragile and conflict-affected settings. Participants then moved from conceptual discussion into actor mapping, factor mapping, opportunity mapping, and scenario construction.

The country case was not used to predict a national future. It was used to ask how different futures might affect present-day engagement. Participants identified critical uncertainties, built a small set of contrasting scenarios, and tested strategic options against them. The scenarios included, among others, a future of strong digital and economic dynamism; a future in which automation and digitalization advanced without sufficient job and livelihood creation; and a future in which growth was accompanied by widening divides and weakening institutional coherence.

These scenarios were deliberately not forecasts. They were structured “what if” stories designed to test whether assumptions about partners, investments, delivery channels, and development pathways would still hold if the context shifted. In a future of broad-based economic dynamism, the role of a development partner looked different from one in which automation displaced workers or institutions weakened despite economic expansion.

Participants reported that the exercise challenged long-held assumptions, expanded the time horizon beyond standard planning cycles, and surfaced tensions that conventional analysis had not brought into view. A recurring observation was that scenario work helped them see possibilities and risks that had remained invisible in more linear analysis. Opportunity mapping also helped surface local strengths, adaptive capacities, and possible openings for engagement alongside downside risks.

The practice case suggests three implications for teams working in fragile settings.

First, scenario planning makes differentiated engagement more concrete. Differentiation is often understood as tailoring engagement across countries or classifications. Scenario planning adds another dimension: tailoring choices across plausible trajectories within the same context. By comparing options across several futures, teams can identify which choices appear robust, which need adaptation, and which should depend on early signals.

Second, flexibility can be designed rather than improvised. In volatile settings, some choices are difficult or costly to reverse. These may concern which partnerships to deepen, how to sequence institutional support, when to commit to major infrastructure, or which delivery channels to use. Scenario analysis can help teams identify where flexibility needs to be preserved through phased implementation, modular investments, diversified partnerships, or agreed review points.

Third, strategic foresight can help teams examine opportunities as well as deficits. Standard assessments understandably focus on risks, institutional shortcomings, and potential sources of violence. However, an exclusive focus on deficits may obscure local capabilities, emerging coalitions, and unexpected pathways toward resilience. Scenario exercises create space to ask not only what might go wrong but what else might become possible.

Using scenarios does not need to mean creating another standalone process. Development teams already hold discussions around diagnostics, project design, portfolio reviews, and country engagement. These conversations can be placed within a scenario frame by asking three simple questions:

• What future is the current approach implicitly assuming?
• What two or three other futures could plausibly unfold?
• Which choices would remain useful and which would need to change, if the context moved in a different direction?

The answers can help teams clarify assumptions, recognize where flexibility is needed, and agree which signals should prompt renewed discussion. Better anticipation tells development actors more about what to watch. Scenario planning helps them decide what to do when the future refuses to conform to prior assumptions.

For teams working in fragile contexts, scenario planning can be used to

• test major assumptions during diagnostics, portfolio reviews, or strategy discussions;
• distinguish choices that are robust, adaptable, or conditional on context changes;
• identify where flexibility should be preserved through phased implementation, diversified partnerships, or sequenced support;
• agree on signposts that would trigger strategic review; and
• examine opportunities and local capabilities alongside risks and institutional deficits.

D. C. North. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press.

F. H. Knight. 1921. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Houghton Mifflin.

R. Ramirez and A. Wilkinson. 2016. Strategic Reframing: The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach. Oxford University Press.

World Bank Group. A Refreshed WBG Strategy for Engaging in FCV Settings.