---
id: people/clement-bezold
about:
  label: Clement Bezold
  description: >-
    American political scientist and futurist who edited Anticipatory Democracy
    and co-founded the Institute for Alternative Futures.
  tags:
    - anticipatory democracy
    - futures studies
    - scenarios
person:
  affiliation: Institute for Alternative Futures
  role: political scientist and futurist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Clement Bezold - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Bezold'
    - title: Institute for Alternative Futures
      url: 'http://www.altfutures.org/'
    - title: >-
        Anticipatory Democracy and Aspirational Futures (Clement Bezold, Journal
        of Futures Studies 15(2), November 2010)
      url: 'https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/152-S06.pdf'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Clement Bezold is an American political scientist and futurist with a PhD in political science from the University of Florida.[^1] The Institute for Alternative Futures was founded in 1977 by Alvin Toffler, Jim Dator and Bezold, at first as part of Antioch University, and became an independent non-profit in 1979.[^2] It worked with over 700 organisations, from communities and legislatures to health systems, and closed at the end of 2019.[^2] In 1982 he started Alternative Futures Associates, a consulting firm.[^1] Much of his writing is on the future of health care.[^1]

A few years after Future Shock, Toffler asked him to edit a book reviewing experiments in looking ahead and involving the public.[^3] At the institute he developed an "aspirational futures" approach, which builds scenarios along expectable, challenging and visionary paths and uses them to help communities choose a preferred future.[^3] He counts Alternatives for Washington, in which more than 60,000 people took part and voted on eleven alternative futures, among the most significant programmes of its kind.[^3]

He is the editor of [Anticipatory Democracy](/media/anticipatory-democracy/), with an introduction by [Alvin Toffler](/people/alvin-toffler/). His reading of Toffler's argument appears in [Future Shock](/media/future-shock/), and the book appears in the history of anticipatory democracy in [foresight and anticipation](/terms/foresight-and-anticipation/).