The annual Geostrategic Outlook presents analysis by the EY-Parthenon Geostrategic Business Group (GBG) on the likely changes in the global political risk environment in the year ahead. The GBG is a global network of geopolitical risk professionals with years of experience in political risk, government policy, the public sector, strategy and academia.
To select the top 10 geopolitical developments in the 2025 Geostrategic Outlook, the GBG first conducted a crowdsourced horizon scanning exercise in August-September 2024 to identify potential political risks. The scanning exercise drew on inputs from multiple internal and external data and research sources. The GBG also collected inputs from dozens of individuals across EY teams around the world, including those focused on public policy, strategy, macro trends and sector-level developments. This scan encompassed the four categories of political risk in the geostrategy framework: geopolitical, country, regulatory and societal. The GBG then identified additional developments through interviews with subject matter resources in other political risk organizations.
Next, the GBG assessed all the identified political risks along two dimensions: their probability of occurring and the degree to which they would have impact on companies across sectors and geographies globally. This impact assessment is aligned with the second step in implementing a geostrategy, which is critical for understanding how geopolitics could affect transformations at global organizations. The top 10 geopolitical developments included in this Outlook are those that were assessed to be both high probability and high impact, broadly speaking, for global companies.