ORF Global Quarterly: Navigating Megatrends for 2026

Setting the Compass: 2026

Welcome to the first edition of ORF Global Quarterly. This is the signature publication of ORF Global, a new virtual centre established in 2025 to serve as a collaboration hub for ORF’s three India locations—Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata— and two overseas affiliates, ORF America and ORF Middle East. The virtual centre helps identify themes for ORF’s international convening and research, and acts as a curator for its scholarly research, publications, and insights from our dialogues.

ORF Global Quarterly is designed to amplify prominent voices, insights, and perspectives from Global South countries which, despite their demographic significance and increasing economic weight, are often under-represented in scholarly literature. Authors are scholars of the Observer Research Foundation located in three regions (India, the Middle East, and North America) and invited contributors from ORF’s community around the globe.

In late 2025, as we were considering the audience, purpose, and scope of this publication, we decided to launch with a broad assessment of the 2026 landscape. For our first edition, we identified six domains: Geopolitics, Defense, and Security • Geoeconomics and Trade • Technology • Climate and Energy Transitions • Agriculture, Health, and Urbanization • Education, Skills, Labor, and Immigration. Why these six? These domains cover a broad spectrum of transformative inter-state dynamics, international organizing principles, and socioeconomic structures changing around us rapidly.

We invited our ORF scholars to look ahead into 2026 to predict and guide our readers through a variety of megatrends—transformative, long-term, structural global changes—that are expected to be pivotal for Global South actors in these six domains.

When analyzing global challenges, perspective matters. Whether megatrends are perceived as opportunities or challenges depends on geography, priorities, and geopolitical standpoint. In other words, what is of greatest significance in Brazil may resonate differently in Malaysia—or in Germany.

There are numerous qualitative trends and risk analysis available, but they are typically done through a Global North perspective. In 2025, ORF Global conducted a scoping exercise and review of 20+ prominent and publicly available risk and megatrend reports published since the beginning of the decade. We found that the ways in which trends and risks may affect different actors are primarily analyzed by organizations based in the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. These reports came from corporate ecosystems, think tanks, international organizations, and public institutions, and they are predominantly produced in English with a Western frame of reference. The conclusion is apparent: forward-looking, open-access megatrends literature rarely reflects Global South perspectives. This inaugural edition of ORF Global Quarterly seeks to bridge that gap.

To identify and assess the megatrends in the six domains, ORF Global Quarterly applies a new methodology that departs from the typical approach of response-driven surveys. Our scholars reviewed more than 170 unilateral, bilateral or multilateral declarations, announcements, and statements in recent years, looking for references to long-term, structural changes. We believe, in most cases, the comparative analysis of openly stated goals in strategic documents and statements, and what they imply, is a more meaningful indicator of intent and focus than data collected through voluntary response surveys.

These essays were contributed and edited in December 2025 and recent events were closely monitored until early January for relevant updates. Subsequent quarterly editions in 2026 will provide deeper dives into the megatrends of these domains.

We understand the world is unpredictable, turbulent, and complicated. We hope ORF Global Quarterly provides you with perspectives that are unique and valuable, outlining risks and opportunities in ways that help you understand, prepare for, and navigate the year ahead.

Read the journal here.