15  GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
games where one side has to lose in order for the other to win. Of course, people, states and global institutions will continue to be self-interested in part. However, Anticipatory Governance harnesses these “forces of self-interest to achieve socially desirable moral objectives� (Beckmann & Pies: 2009) and generate a shift towards mutually beneficial positive-sum actions. We now have the technology to analyse, monitor and collate information about our external environment. Monitoring systems have moved from processing data to processing information, meaning we not only collect vast amounts of data but we can organise it in ways which are socially useful to us, as information. If knowledge on best-practices of cooperation and morally good and sustainable governance is shared, then organisations, whether political or corporate, will have no excuse if they ignore this information when taking strategic decisions. If the global complex refuses to employ Anticipatory Governance then the next generation will rightly accuse us of gross negligence. What is more, refusing to anticipate the rich array of contingencies available to us will only result in futile fire fighting. Witness the alarm surrounding the financial crisis. Imaginative and timely global governance had not kept pace with global economic activity and without an effective means of regulation, our collective future was put at risk by toxic and unsustainable self-interest. What we see around us now might be something more akin to the old world, and its old ways of thinking are collapsing around us.