Future Livestock Systems: Scenario-guided policy review workshop

The recent CCAFS and the LSIL scenarios process focuses on contextual drivers of change for agriculture and food security – climate change and socio-economic changes (e.g. in markets, governance, broad economic developments, infrastructure)

Politically Reflexive Foresight: Emancipating foresight for governance of social-ecological systems

This dissertation focuses on the application of foresight—methods for anticipating uncertain futures—in governance of social-ecological systems (SES). SES are complex adaptive systems characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability, and to govern them effectively, future uncertainty has to be taken into account. Governing SES is inherently political, as different stakeholder groups perceive SES differently, and their stakes may differ and even conflict with each other. However, strikingly, the majority of SES scholarship—as well as foresight for SES governance—tends to pay little attention to the social and normative dimensions of SES, or to the role of power dynamics. As a consequence, there is the risk of reproducing existing—often unsustainable—power dynamics, which may reduce the space for imagining radically different, transformative futures as alternatives to explorations of futures that are still very much rooted in present-day business-as-usual thinking. All in all, one could say that the practice of foresight for SES governance does not sufficiently take into account the politics at play. I therefore argue that there is a need for more political reflexivity within foresight for SES governance. This dissertation investigates a number of avenues for improving the political reflexivity of foresight for SES governance. It explores how adjacent critical fields of scholarship can contribute to improving foresight for SES governance and subsequently zooms in on a number of specific, promising contributions: how insights from critical systems theory can enhance participatory system and problem framing; how being reflexive towards the way in which societal imaginaries are expressed in the futures imagined in foresight processes can increase the inclusiveness and potentially inform more ambitious and transformative policies; and how bottom-up niche initiatives—disruptive seeds—that challenge the current unsustainable status quo can improve the transformative potential of foresight for SES governance. This dissertation concludes that a politically reflexive mode of foresight can help to address a specifically problematic aspect of current environmental research agendas: they are dominated by the natural sciences and tend to focus on changes in the Earth’s biogeochemical characteristics and processes, which often has little use for informing policy action, and—worse—might even serve vested interests. It could be argued that we need to profoundly transform environmental research and to shift our attention to approaches rooted in the social sciences and humanities and to participatory research, in which politically reflexive foresight can play a crucial role. In addition, this dissertation concludes that academia in general should become more future-oriented. There is still much to gain, both in research and higher education. It is crucial to confront and address the structural and institutional challenges in terms of funding for futures research, especially in the realms of the social sciences and humanities, capacities, and training

Disruptive Seeds and transformation pathways for Guatemala's food system

This working paper describes a bottom-up approach to transformative change, the Disruptive Seeds approach. It is applied as part of ClimBeR’s Policy Pathways research (Work Package 3) in Guatemala and focuses on the potential of sustainable niche initiatives (i.e., disruptive seeds) that have the potential to grow in terms of impact. The objective of the project is to develop pathways for transformation of Guatemala’s food system based on identified seed initiatives. Seeds, in this regard, refer to “initiatives (social, technological, economic, or social–ecological ways of thinking or doing) that exist, at least in prototype form, and that represent a diversity of worldviews, values, and regions, but are not currently dominant in the world” (Bennett et al. 2016:442) and “real-world agents of current social-ecological transformation that are currently marginal, but have the potential to grow in impact” (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2019:606). The Seeds approach offers a novel, bottom-up method of transformative scenario development based on real- world initiatives (Bennett et al. 2016; Pereira et al. 2018)

An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research: Theory and Practice

This book (128 pp.) serves as an introduction and manual to guide students through the interdisciplinary research process. We are becoming increasingly aware that, as a result of technological developments and globalisation, problems are becoming so complex that they can only be solved through cooperation between multiple disciplines. Healthcare, climate change, food security, energy, financial markets and quality of life are just a few examples of issues that require scientists and academics to work in a crossdisciplinary way. As a result of these developments, an interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly popular in higher education and must be considered an absolute necessity. Young academics are being called on to step beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines in order to contribute to addressing fundamental problems and solving challenges facing society. There is a need for people who are not afraid to ask critical questions, who can work together well and can look beyond the boundaries of their own field. This means students need to learn more about how they can integrate and apply knowledge, methods and skills from different fields. Interdisciplinary research projects and practical training courses offer students more than one perspective on the same subject. Comparing and contrasting, connecting, adding and adapting concepts, theories and methodologies from different disciplines ultimately results in new insights and better answers to complex problems

Disruptive seeds and transformation pathways for Guatemala's food system

This presentation summarizes the Disruptive Seeds approach to transformative change and briefly explains how it is applied in the context of ClimBeR’s Policy Pathways research (Work Package 3) in Guatemala. It also describes the progress of the project thus far, the planning for 2023, and highlights a few promising seed initiatives (i.e., sustainable, bottom-up initiatives that can contribute to transformative change)

Scenario-guided policy planning in Uganda

Using socio-economic scenarios in policy formulation allows for an anticipatory approach to governance processes and the formulation of policies/plans that take into account future uncertainty To fully benefit from the dividends of scenario planning in the Ugandan context, there is need to build the scenario-guided planning capacity of both public and private sectors. There is need for follow up and continuous engagement with government officials responsible after the review process to enable inclusion of recommendations generated into the final policy documents. In some cases, the abstract nature of national policy statements limits the level of detail, hence detailed scenario guided recommendations and information may not easily fit in the existing policy formats. The approach is new and requires extra awareness creation not only for the government officers who draft policies but also for other major policy actors such as the political leadership who approve the policies

European scenarios for future biological invasions

1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature's contributions to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in the future across spatial scales. 2. Based on previous work on global invasion scenarios, we developed a workflow to downscale global scenarios to a regional and policy-relevant context. We applied this workflow at the European scale to create four European scenarios of biological invasions until 2050 that consider different environmental, socio-economic and socio-cultural trajectories, namely the European Alien Species Narratives (Eur-ASNs). 3. We compared the Eur-ASNs with their previously published global counterparts (Global-ASNs), assessing changes in 26 scenario variables. This assessment showed a high consistency between global and European scenarios in the logic and assumptions of the scenario variables. However, several discrepancies in scenario variable trends were detected that could be attributed to scale differences. This suggests that the workflow is able to capture scale-dependent differences across scenarios. 4. We also compared the Global- and Eur-ASNs with the widely used Global and European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), a set of scenarios developed in the context of climate change to capture different future socio-economic trends. Our comparison showed considerable divergences in the scenario space occupied by the different scenarios, with overall larger differences between the ASNs and SSPs than across scales (global vs. European) within the scenario initiatives. 5. Given the differences between the ASNs and SSPs, it seems that the SSPs do not adequately capture the scenario space relevant to understanding the complex future of biological invasions. This underlines the importance of developing independent but complementary scenarios focussed on biological invasions. The downscaling workflow we implemented and presented here provides a tool to develop such scenarios across different regions and contexts. This is a major step towards an improved understanding of all major drivers of global change, including biological invasions

Transformative horizons: reflecting on a decade of scenario-guided policy formulation

Participatory foresight has proliferated rapidly in response to unprecedented global uncertainty and the need to transform to more sustainable societies. However, the link from foresight to action is often under-researched; and understanding how foresight can be used for the realization of transformative ambitions has proven particularly difficult. In this paper, we reflect on a unique case: a project that spans eleven years of scenario-guided participatory policy formulation processes for food security and agriculture under climate change across seven global regions. Many of the policy formulation processes in these regions have led to changed policies and plans as a result of participatory scenario analysis. The length, scope, and level of policy engagement that characterizes this case offers unique opportunities for learning about impactful foresight. In addition, lessons from the project have proliferated into a range of other initiatives that have often been able to complement the original project strategies with new approaches that have in turn yielded more insights. We provide core insights from the successes and failures in this unique global case for connecting foresight to action by examining interactions between 1) institutional contexts and knowledge systems; 2) relationships with the future; 3) imaginaries; 4) participation cultures; 5) process designs and participants; and 6) futures methodology. We then go on to discuss how such best practices can be ‘scaled deep’; ‘scaled out’; and ‘scaled up’ for transformative change