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This paper considers the changes in education and capacity building that are needed in response to environmental and social challenges of the 21 st Century. We argue that such changes will require more than adjustments in current educational systems, research funding strategies, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Instead, it calls for a deeper questioning of the assumptions and beliefs that frame both problems and solutions. We first discuss the challenges of transforming education and capacity building within five key arenas such as interdisciplinary research, the primary, secondary and tertiary education systems, researchers from the developing world, and the public at large and politicians. Our starting point is that any type of revolution that is proposed in response to global change is likely to reflect the educational perspectives and paradigms of those calling for the revolution. We differentiate between a circular revolution (as in the "plan-do-check-act cycle" often used in change management) versus an axial revolution (moving to a different way of thinking about the issues), arguing that the latter is a more appropriate response to the complex transdisciplinary challenges posed by global environmental change. We present some potential tools to promote an axial revolution, and consider the limits to this approach. We conclude that rather than promoting one large and ideologically homogenous revolution in education and capacity building, there is a need for a revolution in the way that leaders working with education and capacity building look at systems and processes of change. From this perspective, transformative learning may not only be desirable, but critical in responding to the challenges posed by global environmental change.

Futures Literacy is the capacity to design and implement processes that make use of anticipation, generally with the purpose of trying to understand and act in a complex emergent context. This article examines the potential of Futures Literacy to contribute to the realisation of a better balance between learning that is shaped by the supposition that what needs to be learned is knowable in advance, what I will label ‘push’ education, and ‘pull’ learning, that starts from the discovery of not knowing something, initiating the search for hypotheses, experiments, and evidence that eventually lead to understanding. Insufficient Futures Literacy impedes the expansion our anticipatory activities beyond preparation and planning, with the result that at both the individual and institutional levels it is difficult to find the motivation and capability to undertake and organise learning that goes beyond ‘push’ education, or what people ‘need’ to know now in order to get: a ‘good job’, be ‘good citizens’, etc., in the future. As a result humanity may be less able to embrace complexity or pursue a diversification approach to resilience.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to put the paper by Jay Ogilvy in the context of current debates around the philosophical foundations of future studies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the form of a review and analyzes the current literature on foresight and philosophy of the future.FindingsThe paper finds that the practical challenge of taking a “scenaric stance”, as articulated in “Facing the fold”, cannot be addressed without going beyond the typically epistemological solutions proposed by most futurists.Research limitations/implicationsThe challenge is not finding ways to “know” the future, rather to find ways to live and act with not‐knowing the future.Practical implicationsThe “scenaric stance” points to a way of embracing what Henri Bergson calls “the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty.”Social implicationsThe “scenaric stance” offers one way of addressing the difficult, often deeply painful challenge of reconciling the desire for certainty with the desire to “be free” – in the Senian sense of capacity – by providing a way to embrace ambiguity and spontaneity.Originality/valueThe emergence of new solutions to how people think about the future rather than what kind of future reflects a confluence of events in the realms of theory and practice. The reason why one needs to and can rethink how one thinks about the future is original to the present conjuncture.