This article examines the history of the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios, from the first horizon scan exercise in 1967. It proposes that forward-looking scenarios were integrated in planning at Shell as tools for managing uncertainty in global time and space relations of oil after 1967. Specifically, the article proposes that Shell strategically used the scenarios to respond to arguments, emanating both from OPEC and from the Club of Rome, of oil as a limited resource. Shell used the scenarios to create images of a future oil market dominated by innovation, creativity, and sustainable solutions.

In 1975, the OECD created a research committee entitled ‘Interfutures. Research project into the development of the advanced industrial societies in harmony with the developing world’. The purpose of Interfutures was to examine how the new tools of futures research could be put to use in order to shape strategies for dealing with a new phenomenon of ‘interdependence’, and to set out a ‘long-term vision’ of the Western world. This article argues that Interfutures was appointed in order to draft an alternative image of the future to two radical visions of the early 1970s. The first was the so-called New International Economic Order. The second was the 1972 Club of Rome report, The limits to growth. As a response to these two visions, Interfutures presented a vision of globalization as a process oriented around an expanding world market, piloted by Western interests and continued resource extraction.

This article discusses the Swedish discourse on futures studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on the futures discourse of the group appointed by the Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in 1967 under the chairmanship of Alva Myrdal. The Swedish futures discourse focused on futures studies as a democratic means of reform in defence of the Swedish model and “Swedish” values of solidarity and equality, in opposition to an international futurology dominated by the Cold War and dystopic narratives of global disaster. The article suggests that the creation of Swedish futures studies, culminating in a Swedish institute for futures studies, can be seen as a highpoint of postwar planning and the Swedish belief in the possibility of constructing a particularly Swedish future from a particularly Swedish past.