Abstract
Reaching sustainable and just futures for people and nature requires tackling complex social-ecological challenges across multiple scales, from local to global. Pathways towards such futures are largely driven by people’s decisions and actions, underpinned by multiple types of motivations and values. Thus, understanding the link between potential futures and the values underpinning them represents a key question of current sustainability research, recently embraced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Particularly the understanding of causal chains leading from values to futures across different contexts and scales is vital to identify which sustainability pathways to collectively pursue. In this study, we build on a transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation process in an array of local case studies in protected areas in the Czechia (Central Europe). We apply the Life Framework of Values and the Three Horizons framework in an innovative value-based participatory scenario building process to explore the relationships between (1) multiple types of values, (2) actions taken by different types of stakeholders, and (3) their potential impacts on nature, nature’s contributions to people (including ecosystem services) and good quality of life. The resulting local-scale value-based pathways show the complex relationship between multiple types of values for nature and potential future trajectories. Finally, we reflect on the utility of value-based participatory scenario planning as a means to strengthen sustainable governance. We highlight that if participatory deliberation of values is to support decision-making processes, its design needs to carefully reflect local context and institutional set-up.
Highlights
Futures thinking represents an approach helping people to understand and tackle complex sustainability challenges (IPBES 2016)
Elements and driving forces incorporated in exploratory scenarios have been frequently limited to those that are possible to assess with models (Rosa et al 2020; Geist and Lambin 2002)
The highest proportion of value post-its was allocated in the centre of the value framework in two out of three Protected Landscape Areas (PLAs) (Figure S3), only in the PLA characterized by sandstone towers and lakes (Kokořínsko), values related to “living with” nature were predominant
Summary
Futures thinking represents an approach helping people to understand and tackle complex sustainability challenges (IPBES 2016). The field of futures studies recognizes various types of techniques which facilitate nuanced thinking about current and future dynamics and potential future development. In this respect, one of the most frequently developed types of futures works are exploratory scenarios. An example of a recent approach striving to bridge the exploratory and pathway-development aspects of futures thinking has been the Three Horizons framework, a tool for stakeholder-based exploration of futures supporting adaptive and transformative agency of involved actors (Sharpe et al 2016)
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