The Three Horizons Framework (THF) is a “pathways approach to facilitating transformative change that helps participants work with complex and intractable problems and uncertain futures.”14 The complementary approach is important for helping groups work with uncertainty while also generating agency in ways not always addressed by existing futures approaches.15

The use of the THF is justified as a research method applied to youth and social justice futures because as Andrew Curry et al, put it, “it can relate drivers and trends-based futures analysis to emerging issues, enables policy or strategy implications of futures to be identified, and it links futures work to processes of change”16 allowing for:

  • a simple structure for working with complexity,
  • development of future consciousness (an awareness of the future potential in the present moment),
  •  distinguishing between incremental and transformative change,
  • making explicit the processes of power and patterns of renewal,
  •  enabling the exploration of how to manage transitions,
  •  provides a framework for dialogue among actors with different mindsets.17

The decision to use the 3HF approach as research method will have the following benefits:

  • enables going beyond the usual focus on fixing problems in the present,
  •   connects the present with the desired future and identifies some of the disruptions which might occur in moving towards a desired future,
  • clarifies how to identify existing dominant systems and the challenges to sustainability in the future (the case for change),
  •  explores how to think through the desired future state and emerging options,

  identify how the third horizon vision comes closer to reality through the intermediate space of transition – unstable, tensions, dilemmas, collisions, divergences.18