Abstract
Ecosystems are currently experiencing rapid changes. Decision-makers need to anticipate future changes or challenges that will emerge in order to implement both short-term actions and long-term strategies for reducing undesirable impacts. Strategic foresight has been proposed to help resolve these challenges for better planning and decision-making in an uncertain future. This structured process scrutinizes the options in an uncertain future. By exploring multiple possible futures, this process can offer insights into the nature of potential changes, and thereby to better anticipate future changes and their impacts. This process is performed in close partnership with multiple actors in order to collect broader perspectives about potential futures. Through a large research initiative, we applied the strategic foresight protocol to a set of different case studies, allowing us as academic ecologists to reflect on the circumstances that may be influential for the success of this approach. Here, we present what worked and what did not, along with our perception of the underlying reasons. We highlight that the success of such an endeavour depends on the willingness of the people involved, and that building social capital among all participants involved directly from the start is essential for building the trust needed to ensure an effective functioning among social groups with different interests and values.
Highlights
In the context of current rapid ecosystem changes, decision-making requires understanding how an ecosystem functions and might have been altered by known changes that have occurred in the past, it needs to anticipate potential future changes or challenges that will emerge (OECD 2019)
By ‘hiding’ these processes, scientists hinder the building of trust and social capital among parties
This is done by exploring multiple possible futures and offering insights into the nature of potential future changes (Slaughter 1997, Ringland 2010)
Summary
In the context of current rapid ecosystem changes, decision-making requires understanding how an ecosystem functions and might have been altered by known changes that have occurred in the past, it needs to anticipate potential future changes or challenges that will emerge (OECD 2019). To reach such a level of knowledge and ensure it will be applicable for decision-making, close collaborations among all interested parties and scientists are required more than ever (Boone et al 2020). Trust and social capital are attributes that can help in reducing the asymmetry of power among interested parties (Vallet et al 2020), which becomes essential when the results of a study point to the necessity of implementing actions that are difficult to accept by the community (Stokols 2006, Newton & Elliott 2016, Boone et al 2020)
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