Designing a rapid participatory scenario planning process

By Giles Thomson and Varvara Nikulina

How can transdisciplinary researchers efficiently and effectively support diverse and time-poor actors in participatory scenario planning processes?

Scenario planning is a useful tool for policy development, especially for contexts with high uncertainty and complexity as described by Bonnie McBain in her i2Insights contribution, Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions. However, participatory scenario planning takes time, as pointed out by Maike Hamann and colleagues in their i2Insights contribution, Participatory scenario planning.

To address this challenge, we designed, tested and evaluated a rapid scenario planning method for a regional sustainability transition. In this case, the regional authority (host organization) wanted to increase collaboration and strengthen the link between municipal spatial planning and regional development by building consensus on the region’s most important development issues over a 30-year horizon to 2050.

Before describing the rapid scenario planning process and key lessons learnt, we summarise four key considerations that had to be taken into account.

1. Targeting the stakeholders with agency
   Targeting stakeholders with the power to implement policy change ensures the scenario planning workshop is more than an exercise in collective dreaming. However, a frequent challenge with such stakeholders is that their day-to-day work is often time-demanding and as a result, they are often too time-poor to engage in, or prioritise, long-term planning exercises such as scenario planning.
2. Efficient use of time for time-poor stakeholders
   Traditionally scenario workshops run over several days or even weeks. To overcome the time limitation, we worked closely with the host organisation to compress the scenario planning process into a 7-hour window. To get the most out of this tight timeline, we and other members of the research team gathered the background reports and prepared the baseline data, and organised the assembly of relevant stakeholders.
3. Focussing on strategic direction rather than technical details
   The broad array of stakeholders effectively forms a community of practice that collectively holds a vast repository of local institutional and community knowledge. Our workshop design emphasized strategic activities. This was supported by the preparatory activities, especially analysing the existing long-term policy vision captured in strategic documents and using this to develop alternative exploratory scenarios, settling on four scenarios for discussion. The workshop then focused on refining a shared long-term vision, and then backcasting from this vision.
   Transdisciplinary researchers are well suited to undertaking preparatory activities such as those described above.
4. Researchers as ‘neutral’ facilitators
   As well as undertaking preparatory activities, researchers can act as neutral facilitators in a scenario process, as they have independence from local politics and are therefore freed from the shackles of existing policies or other preconceived limitations. Engagement in a long-horizon scenario planning process also helps workshop participants to think beyond politics, overcoming the problem of connecting transformation narratives to the policy process.

The rapid scenario planning process

Considering the above context, we designed a compressed workshop (limited to 7 hours, ie., one working day), that was sandwiched between a pre-workshop phase (6 months of preparation, liaison and process design with the hosting regional authority) and a post-workshop phase (3 months to summarise and reflect upon the workshop outcomes, including a post-workshop evaluation survey). The roles and relationship between the host agency (the regional authority), the researchers and the stakeholders are summarised in the diagram below.

Key lessons learnt

Pre-workshop

• We and others on the research team gained a deep understanding of the context from the document review and discussions with the regional authority.
• Working with the regional authority (who had the decision power) to determine the scenario planning ‘axes’ saved a lot of time on deliberation among the stakeholders. (The axes were high-low sustainability and low-high population growth.)
• We prepared prompts, such as working with the regional authority’s GIS (Geographical Information Systems) mapping team to develop speculative maps to show the potential impacts of different development patterns. This gave an indication of how land use decisions might impact the region’s sustainability performance.

Workshop

• Providing the summary of the relevant background studies kept the participants focused on the key issues relevant to the scenario formation.
• A key function of the workshop was as an exercise in knowledge exchange between the administrative ‘silos’ of public sector divisions and adjoining or overlapping governance bodies, all of which informed a shared visioning process.
• The workshop captured ideas from a wide range of participants, but it also helped synthesize stakeholder views around desirable futures for the region and how a preferred future could inform policy direction.

Post-workshop

• It is rare to have time to reflect on such processes. Leading such reflection is another role that researchers can play. We harvested the workshop outcomes and summarised this material into a workshop summary report which was distributed to participants. We then conducted a post-workshop survey; the responses were largely positive, however, some respondents said they would like to see more concrete outcomes.
• A more detailed explanation of the bigger picture may have helped participants contextualize the day better, but may also have led to information overload. This is a difficult trade-off to make.
• We and others in the research team also found the evaluation process and our own reflections to be a valuable exercise in learning and process refinement. Through this evaluation process, our initial concern relating to the short workshop timespan was allayed, although we recognised that success was dependent upon a good working relationship with the host organization (the regional authority in our case), the right scaffolding tools, and a knowledgeable stakeholder group. The extensive pre-workshop preparation was critical. Key players in the host organisation suggested that the short workshop time helped achieve a good attendance level and that a longer multi-day event was unlikely to attract a good turnout.

Concluding questions

How do you deal with participatory processes when actors have limited capacity and time? Do you have lessons for encouraging stakeholder groups to put aside the dominant influences of politics and existing policy to reimagine strategic possibilities?

To find out more:

Thomson, G., Ny, H., Nikulina, V. , Borén, S., Ayers, J. and Bryant, J. (2020). Rapid Scenario Planning to Support a Regional Sustainability Transformation Vision: A Case Study from Blekinge, Sweden. Sustainability, 12 , 17: 6928. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176928

Biography: Giles Thomson PhD is a senior research fellow at the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute in Perth,  Australia and a senior lecturer in the Department for Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. He spent 12 years working as an urban designer and city planner in both industry and government and is interested in how transdisciplinary partnerships can help accelerate the uptake of sustainable urban developments.

Biography: Varvara Nikulina PhD is a researcher and lecturer in the Department for Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. Her research interests include but are not limited to participatory planning, sustainability transitions, mobility transitions, governance of socio-technical transitions, transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production, education for sustainable development and transformative learning, and comparative studies.