Banning Garrett

Areas of Expertise

GGC-Governance  •  Future Forecasting

About Banning

Banning Garrett is a Washington-based strategic thinker, writer, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur who focuses on the impact of exponential technologies and their intersection with long-term global trends, urbanization, and geopolitics. Garrett has made presentations to think tanks, business groups, international conferences, UN organizations, and governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United States, and has written for more than two dozen journals and media outlets and been interviewed by numerous international broadcast and print media. Garrett is a consultant to the World Bank; Senior Fellow, Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils; Senior Fellow, Global Urban Development; co-founder of nano RFID company nR LLC, and adviser to several Singularity technology startups.

Garrett was founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative and created and led the Council program on the implications of emerging technologies and its Urban World 2030 program. He was Director of the Council Asia Program (2003-2012) and in 2006 established and subsequently led the Council’s cooperation with the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in production of the NIC unclassified, quadrennial long-term global trends assessments, including Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2008) and Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (2012).

Garrett has also worked on US-China relations since the 1970s. Besides writing and speaking about US-China relations, he consulted to the US Government and conducted an informal strategic dialogue between China and the US from 1981-2002 before joining the Atlantic Council, where he created and directed the Atlantic Council US-China joint assessment of long-term global trends project and was co-author of the project’s 2013 report, China-US Cooperation: Key to Global Future. He was director of the Asia Society project that produced the 2009 report A Roadmap for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change, of which he was co-author. He is the co-author of War and Peace: The Views from Moscow and Beijing (1984) and was the co-founder and CEO Internews international news service and the Internews International Bulletin (1972-80).

Garrett has made sixty trips to China since 1981 for consultations with Chinese officials and analysts as well as numerous similar visits to Russia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. He also traveled with the National Intelligence Council on more than a dozen trips to most of the G-20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe for global trends consultations.

Garrett received his BA in the History of Social Thought and Institutions from Stanford University and his PhD in Politics from Brandeis University.

Selected Speaking Topics: Exponential Technologies and Their Impact on the World; Democratization of Technology and Leveling the Global Playing Field; Long-term Megatrends Shaping the Global Future; The Challenge of Global Grand Challenges; “Peak Globalization” and “just-in-time production at the point of consumption” of energy, food, and manufactured products; Massive Urbanization and the Challenge of Sustainability.