Methods for Developing Multiscale Participatory Scenarios: Insights from Southern Africa and Europe

By Kasper Kok, Reinette Biggs, M. Zurek. 2007

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scenario planning is increasingly recognized as a useful tool for exploring change in social- ecological systems on decadal to centennial time horizons. In environmental decision making, scenario development tends to include participatory methods for engaging stakeholders and is conducted at multiple scales. This paper presents insights from participatory scenario development in two separate multiscale environmental assessments. We find that, to engage stakeholders at multiple scales, it is important that the issues explored at each scale be relevant and credible to stakeholders at that scale. An important trade-off exists between maintaining relevance to stakeholders at different scales and maintaining consistency across scales to allow for comparison of scenarios. Where downscaling methods are used to ensure consistency, there can be important consequences for (1) the diversity of scenario outcomes, (2) temporal mismatches in the storylines at different scales, and (3) power relationships among stakeholders at different scales. We suggest that development of participatory scenarios at multiple scales has a strong potential to contribute to environmental decision making, but it requires a substantial investment of time and resources to realize its full potential.

Subfields: Finance, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/595aa1c4c7eb2b1242cf3075ae94a19d4e439804

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Citations in the corpus

Making Investments in Dryland Development Work: Participatory Scenario Planning in the Makanya Catchment, Tanzania (2008, background): “…scenarios, where storylines are developed at several organizational levels and then linked together, can be used to reduce this problem, but there are still very few examples of scenario-planning processes that have successfully integrated multiple scales (Biggs et al. 2007, Kok et al. 2007).”
Challenges and opportunities in linking carbon sequestration, livelihoods and ecosystem service provision in drylands (2012, background): “Further development of tools that currently focus largely on cattle condition and ecological indicators (e.g. Kruger and Katjivikua, 2010; Reed and Dougill, 2010), can help to identify thresholds for decisionchange, by explicitly outlining pro-poor benefits and incentives associated with moves…”
Modelling with stakeholders (2010, background): “These questions are relevant to any process where different organisational or hierarchical levels are involved (Castella et al., 2005; Kok et al., 2007).”
Participatory Scenario Planning for Protected Areas Management under the Ecosystem Services Framework: the Doñana Social-Ecological System in Southwestern Spain (2011, background): “The comparison might be useful due to the very few examples of participatory scenario processes that have successfully integrated multiple scales (Biggs et al. 2007, Kok et al. 2007).”
Young Scholars Dialogue, part of a Special Feature on Scenarios of global ecosystem services Linking Futures across Scales: a Dialog on Multiscale Scenarios (2007, methodology): “This was an important reason for abandoning the original intention of developing tightly coupled cross-scale scenarios in this exercise (Kok et al. 2007).”
Towards extended shared socioeconomic pathways: A combined participatory bottom-up and top-down methodology with results from the Barents region (2017, methodology): “In addition, local scenarios have been used for assessing impacts of future climate change (Berkhout et al., 2002) and for adaptation planning (Kok et al., 2007; Baard et al., 2012; Carlsen et al., 2012; Berkhout et al., 2014).”
Exploring future changes in smallholder farming systems by linking socio-economic scenarios with regional and household models (2014, background): “(van Notten et al., 2003; Kok et al., 2007).”