20-22 January 2009
Abu Dhabi, UAE

The Agenda for the New Millennium proposes a ‘brain summit’ of thinkers, experts and think tanks at the beginning of the millennium to develop an informed and holistic assessment of the major risks and problems facing humanity and of the most compelling actual and possible common projects. Through structured collaboration, the Agenda will seek to aggregate the best thinking in the world and to compensate for knowledge failures arising from specialization, issue fragmentation, and competition for attention among interest-focused public, private and civil society actors. The Agenda seeks to advance public debate without creating a new institution.

In fostering transparent and public deliberation, the Agenda may take a step toward reconnecting people, knowledge and action.

The Agenda meeting will address several big questions in a brief period:

• What are the main challenges and opportunities (economic, political, social, environmental and other) facing humanity now?
• What criteria can representatives of different areas of expertise agree upon for determining which challenges and opportunities ought most urgently to be addressed?
• What are the time horizons of the agenda items identified?
• What are the links between agenda items—challenges or opportunities that are complementary or that conflict—that may not come to light in single-issue analyses?

The Agenda meetings will seek to produce an actual proposed ‘agenda’ for humanity (or a menu of agendas should no agreement be possible) to inform and advance a wide-angle view in public and policy debate. The goal is not to produce a single model of the world or its future, but rather to synthesize the most urgent and compelling insights from multiple models and perspectives into an agenda for discussion, decision and action. Rather than asking a single research team to develop a single model, the Agenda process will synthesize shared understanding and shareable insight into disparate domains from a meeting of thinkers who might not ordinarily talk to each other, let alone agree.

The Agenda process will begin with white paper inputs on global challenges and opportunities and reasons for long- or short-listing these. Agenda participants will deliberate to develop criteria for including and grouping agenda items. These individual inputs and joint deliberations will feed a summary (or several alternative summaries) of risks, issues, problems, challenges, opportunities and links among them: the Agenda. Where areas of disagreement exist, they will be analyzed in the Agenda report.