Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN) Overview Report

The Odyssean Institute is pleased to share our Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN) overview report, which outlines our work on identifying (including through futures methodologies) key commodities, logistical hubs, and institutional qualities enabling recovery from, and reduction of exposure to global collapse or extinction risks.

In conditions of increasing unilateral defection from globalisation, we collectively risk sleepwalking into counterproductive races to the bottom. Rather than uncritically renewing globalisation, we instead interrogate what blend of onshoring and traditional comparative advantages might better produce the capacities we need for resilience. These capacities are material, in that we need e.g. food, medicines, industrial parts, and completed products that are critical for certain wellbeing aims.

They are also more complex, immaterial processes; futures methodologies, institutional norms, and scientific research that further enhance institutional performance. Most of all, several of the commodities must pass through trade chokepoints and entrepôts, making interventions at these locations enable outcomes to positively cascade. The aim of GRAIN is to encourage both global adoption, and more targeted adoption at these chokepoints, of wiser institutional approaches to building resilience transparently and robustly. If successful, both nodes of persisting complexity (for their self-sufficiency) and nodes of persisting recovery (for their inherent decisive position in these flows) can be strengthened and their capacities dispersed more widely. 

We aim to continue developing the novel analysis undertaken here, where we identified key trade nodes, with future work, for example deploying the first phases or the entirety of the Odyssean Process alongside policy makers and private companies operating at these hubs. Here's to a more resilient future that can create prosperity and increase tractability in the interim, by identifying win-wins in this area. Thank you for reading!