Providing a comprehensive overview of global trends and challenges, the 2007 State of the Future was launched at UN Headquarters in New York on 10 September 2007. Produced by the Millennium Project, under the auspices of the World Federation of UN Associations (WFUNA), the State of the Future report contains insights into the Project’s work from a variety of creative and knowledgeable people, obtaining information from and getting feed back on emerging crises, opportunities, strategic priorities and the feasibility of actions. The report comes in two parts: an extensive 99-page executive summary, and a compact disc containing over 6,000 pages of research, including the Millennium Project’s 11 years of cumulative research.

“The Millennium Project brings together futurists, scholars, business partners and policymakers who work for international organizations, Governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and universities,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information Kiyo Akasaka, who hosted the book launch. As one of the primary products of the Millennium Project, “it collects and assesses judgments from several hundred participants to produce the annual State of the Future report”, he remarked.

“All of us have been in situations where we’ve been asked to provide a big picture of economics, education, politics … but that is extremely difficult to do”, Jerome Glenn pointed out, adding that producing such a complex annual report was a daunting task when he first started the research in 1992. He explained: “We can document a range of potential futures and we have an ongoing and continuous feedback system with our nodes around the world.” It is a decentralized and globalized think tank, said Mr. Glenn, who has over 30 years of experience in futures research for Governments, international organizations and private industry. Co-founder and Director of the Millennium Project, Mr. Glenn told the UN Chronicle that it was an ongoing and accumulative project with specialized studies for each year’s report. Chapter 3 of the 2007 report presents 19 possibilities that could influence future education and learning by the year 2030 in a special study which distills insights from more than 200 participants from around the world.
 
A new idea mentioned in the report is “trans-institution”, according to Mr. Glenn, which is a kind of new institutional invention that allows independent organizations—Governments, corporations, NGOs, universities, individuals and the United Nations or international organizations—to act like a trans-institution and cooperate with each other. The report states: “Each trans-institution could improve global resilience as coalitions of the willing, composed of national resilience officers and their counterparts in corporations, NGOs, universities and international organizations.” Mr. Glenn also suggested that trans-institutions should be created for each of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are referred to throughout the report.

Speaking at the book launch, Stephen Schlesinger, former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University, said: “This is quite an extraordinary project. It is a balanced, nuanced, forward-looking and prerogative document.” The 2007 State of Future report is about bringing nations together and working in unison. “The notion of the UN itself is collective security, which is about nations working together for the benefit of all humankind”, Professor Schlesinger noted.  Hoping the report will be well-circulated both within and outside the Organization, he said that as we are reaching the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it would be a most reliable guide, which would help form the UN agenda for the future.