No other organization has contributed as much or for as long to thinking about how to deal with the longer-range future than has RAND. RAND’s methodological work started in the late 1950s and 1960s with the developments of the Delphi method and scenario analysis. It’s methodological work has continued sporadically through the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, computational technology has enabled new futures methodologies such as robust decisionmaking and scenario discovery and RAND is again leading the way in putting them to use in dealing with the challenges of the future.

• Robust Decisionmaking
• Scenario Discovery
• Delphi
• Scenarios
• Probabilistic Forecasts
• Other

Specific Topics:

There are several areas in which RAND has done a number of related studies that specifically addressed the longer-range future.

• Climate change: A good deal of the recent Pardee Center work has centered on various aspects of climate change. The Center has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (with Center director Rob Lempert sharing in that honor).
• Netherlands storm-surge barrier: In the mid-1970s RAND led the analysis of alternative storm surge barriers for the Netherlands, leading up to the alternative that has since been implemented. Rand has also done additional studies of the wider problem of water management in the Netherlands.
• Energy
• Macroeconomics

Specific Time Horizons

In addtion to the three areas of concentration, RAND has done a wide variety of studies dealing with the longer-range future that can be roughly grouped into the following time periods:

• 10-19 years
• 20-29 years
• 30-49 years
• 50 or more years
• the indefinite future

RAND has done a wide variety of strategic planning work. Much of that work would fall under the category of longer-range policy work and can be found above under “Longer-Range Studies.” There are four specific strategic planning areas, however, that deserve mention for the pioneering methdological work that has gone on at RAND:

• Assumption-Based Planning
• Capabilities-based Planning
• "The Day After..." Methodology
• Strategies-To-Tasks

A number of students have used Robust Decision Making and other Pardee Center Methodologies in their dissertations.

• Dissertations