Our team (pre-LUGARIT) was commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) to develop future scenarios for the Arab region, focusing on regional challenges associated with conflicts and their impacts on the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Development Agenda.  This project was part of a larger research and policy project the consultant was delivering for ESCWA.  

Scenario Development 

We lay out a framework for future scenarios for the Arab region, based on characteristics and drivers of regional and national conflicts.  And we produce four plausible scenarios: 

1. One scenario would involve sufficient traction among reginal actors to allow enable a progressive progress to resolve individual national conflicts, yet regional tensions will continue to inhibit a grand win-win approach. 

2. The second scenario assumes that sufficient agreement can be reached to create interdependent regional flows and common interests that would reduce regional tensions and slowly help devastated individual countries to end their wars and recover. 

3. The third scenario is conditioned by regional and national conflicts reinforcing each other leading to a perfect storm. 

4. The fourth scenario assumes that regional agreement is developed sufficiently to contain and manage local conflicts without necessarily being able to resolve them. 

Key Findings 

The main findings of this scenario building exercise are:

1. The whole region suffers developmentally when some parts of it are in conflict. Partial solutions will not allow the region to provide the needed investments to mitigate the challenges of the post 2030 future. 

2. The win-win outcomes of a regional Pax-Arabica will far outweigh the potential outcomes of the zero-sum competition, at least as far as development outcomes are concerned.

3. The region is heading towards a major environmental disaster if no drastic transformations are made. National and regional actors will need to make major compromises if they want to avoid environment and climate related conflicts and disasters in the future. They must start working on evolving the necessary institutions and policies now. 

4. The resilience of the region particularly its high economic resilience has suffered to weather the impact of the 2010-2011 uprisings. Avoiding the next crisis in 2030 will be incumbent on rebuilding that resilience. Only scenario 2 will come close to achieving that. Business as usual will not refurbish the region’s capacity to deal with future crises.