Steven Lichty
The global polycrisis, marked by ecological breakdown, democratic fragility, and deepening inequity, reveals the limits of dominant foresight paradigms rooted in reductionist, linear, and technocratic worldviews. This paper develops an alternative foresight praxis grounded in two intersecting frameworks. The first is Ukama , a Shona ethic and ontology of interdependence, intergenerational continuity, and relational harmony drawn from Southern African thought. The second is Quantum Feminist Futures (QFF), which brings feminist futures studies into dialogue with quantum social theory to foreground entanglement, non-linearity, superposition, and the observer effect as resources for reimagining social transformation. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy is used as a bridging cosmology through which these traditions can be placed in productive conversation. The paper is conceptual and transdisciplinary. It uses comparative theoretical synthesis and Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) to move from the visible symptoms of the polycrisis to its deeper civilisational assumptions. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it shows that Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics and Ukama share a common refusal of atomised individualism and a common understanding of reality as a field of dynamic relations encompassing humans, more-than-human life, ancestors, and future generations. Second, it operationalises three concepts through QFF: entanglement, which illuminates how social actors are linked in ways that exceed simple causality; superposition, which affirms the coexistence of multiple unrealised futures and the possibility of rapid non-linear change; and the observer effect, which foregrounds reflexive, participatory co-creation as central to futures practice. Third, it uses CLA to demonstrate that the polycrisis is not only a policy failure but an ontological failure sustained by myths of separability, mastery, and linear progress. The paper positions relational foresight as a decolonial intervention that centres epistemic plurality, intergenerational responsibility, and the agency of communities in co-emerging futures. Rather than forecasting from a detached standpoint, it reimagines futures work as participatory, embodied, and ethically grounded. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing efforts to articulate Global South Futures as a distinctive domain of inquiry and practice oriented not merely toward resilience or survival, but toward collective and planetary flourishing.