This study will establish the minimum standards that make the places we live in physically and socially acceptable. Using deliberative focus groups with members of public, it will cover living spaces, amenities, safety, community life, built heritage, and preparedness for an ageing population. The findings can provide guidance for urban planning and enable conversations about the future of our neighbourhoods.

Work is central to income security, personal identity, economic vibrancy and fiscal sustainability. Conventional work arrangements are facing unprecedented challenges such as the climate crisis, population ageing, pressures on migration and technological change. This research programme will identify the major risks to work, analyse the underlying drivers, and recommend policy responses for Singapore and other economies in the region. This is a modular research programme that is scalable to cover a wide range of topics and places. Each module will gather and review the latest available evidence, critically assess these with special attention to implications for social exclusion and inequality, and present findings in a concise report. These reports aim to increase public awareness, identify policy options and shape thinking.

The Singapore Futures Programme is envisaged as a public-facing and broad-based one with work spanning both futures capability development projects as well as community engagement. One of the key focus areas will be to educate Singaporeans on crucial governance challenges of the future. The Programme will be centred particularly on emerging trends that will shape Singapore’s future in the long-term; to equip Singaporeans with tools in futures thinking and scenario planning; and also to build a network which will serve as a platform to discuss and debate on policies to prepare for the future.

A global care crisis led by rapid population ageing has seen rising demands for care outpace supply, in large part because the work of care remains undervalued and exploited. Many governments are asking if there are better ways to 'do' care. How We Care is a project to assess and guide care policy development through the creation of a novel framework that can be applied across diverse societies. Grounded in feminist care ethics, the framework will extend beyond the immediate domains of care to include larger questions of citizenship. It will combine principles found in the theoretical literature and empirical insights from fieldwork involving care providers and recipients.

This study will investigate the intersections between the low-wage economy, social policies and the COVID-19 crisis, and their impact on Singaporean households living in poverty. Data will be gathered through two waves of in-depth interviews with 60 low-income households six to nine months apart. The study report will lay out the consequences of the crisis for economically vulnerable households, highlight the strengths and gaps in social policies, and offer recommendations for future responses to similar health crises.

The COVID-19 lockdown around the world has resulted in unprecedented effects on families that the world does not fully understand. Amidst common belief that spending more time together may increase family bonding newspaper reports have revealed that the lockdown has actually led to higher divorce rates in China. This study will make use of an existing framework and data that has already been gathered prior to the pandemic, to compare it with new data post-COVID-19. Results of this study explores the effects of COVID-19 lockdown on families in Singapore. In addition to that, the study will also gather and look into data on marital satisfaction, and quality of relationships between parents and their children.

Governments around the world have faced two related challenges in their efforts to respond to the spread of COVID-19. First, the epidemiology was constantly changing and evolving which impacted the efficacy of the policy response with profound implications for how many lives would be saved and lost. Second, experts often disagreed about the approach to deal with the crisis owing to different implicit moral philosophies pertaining to pandemics as a policy problem.

This study aims to systematically assess lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for managing future outbreaks. It will address following two broad questions:

1. How might the most appropriate and effective institutions designs be developed in advance of the next global pandemic?
2. How can governments and international processes deliberate over, and resolve, competing moral philosophies about how to engage different types of expert advice well before, rather than during, the next pandemic?

The disruptions caused by COVID-19 in the global food supply have greatly affected both supply and demand in all countries. Countries that depend on imports, like Singapore, are particularly more vulnerable.

Singapore relies on the international market for 80-90% of its food supplies. Its food imports from neighbouring countries, particularly Malaysia, have become problematic in recent years. As a result, China and the United States have become increasingly important in Singapore’s food supply diversification efforts. But the overall stability of the global food systems rely heavily on the outcome of the ongoing contestations between the United States and China.

This independent research will study the impacts of COVID-19 on food supply chains domestically; lessons on how Singapore has coped with the superpowers; what have been their policies towards international food trade and investments; and the actual and potential impacts on Singapore. The study targets to serve Singapore’s policy makers and practitioners, as well as academics, as it provides an understanding of scenarios for Singapore’s potential food sources and food supplies in the future.