Created 22/01/2012 09:17:05 AM

Whenever I hear or read the term “Sustainable Development”, especially in terms of futures thinking, I remember automatically The Millennium Project that assembles research and judgments of some 2,100 people worldwide in more than 50 countries, organized in 26 Nodes (groupings of individuals and institutions) and is published annually in the name of State of the Future (Glenn &  Gordon, 2010).

We know that the “sustainable development” approach to progress builds on the impressive gains of last century, but within boundaries of ecology and general well-being for our today world. It has an ethical foundation and acknowledges that the long-term matters. Still, sustainable development needs help: enlightened policies and green technologies alone will not be enough. In this sense, the futurists use their knowledge and experience in the way of building sustainable futures.

First, they deal with the issue of goal setting. There are two poles of the spectrum in relation to goal setting–exploration and pre-policy research. Exploration covers learning, awareness-raising, the stimulation of creative thinking, and investigating the interaction of societal processes (Schwartz, 1991; European Environment Agency and ICIS, 2000; Van der Heijden, 1996). In exploratory scenario exercises, the process may well be as important as the product. The “Which World?: Scenarios for the 21st Century” (Hammond, 1998) is a good example of an exploratory exercise investigating possible paths to alternative futures.

However, Hammond (1998) warns his readers that scenarios are not predictions. We should remember that Allan Hammond’s book grew out of a major project financed and conducted by three well-known think tanks, the World Resources Institute (his own organization), the Brookings Institution, and the Santa Fe Institute. The project’s principals imagined the world over the next 50 years by using trend analysis and scenarios. Though they recognized that the world is a complex system, they decided that it was too complex to analyze in any way other than the “crudest” of single dimension extrapolations and a tripartite set of metaphorical worlds: “market, fortress, and transformed.” Interactions are recognized, of course, but not very systematically analyzed.

On the other hand, scenarios are used to examine paths to futures that vary according to their desirability. Decision support scenarios may be variously described as desirable, optimistic, high-road, or utopic; conventional or middle-of-the-road; and undesirable, pessimistic, low-road, dystopic, or doom scenarios. Such scenarios may propose concrete options for strategic decision-making. It is more common to offer implicit policy recommendations (van Notten, 2005).

In practice, studies are often hybrids straddling the two poles of exploration and pre-policy research (Van der Heijden, 1996). In a first phase, scenarios may be developed in exploration of a field which will often be too general to serve as the basis for decision-making. According to van Notten (2005), the most desirable Mont Fleur scenario, for example – the Flight of the Flamingos – describes a South Africa successfully negotiating the post-apartheid transition period in public policy terms.

Coming back to Hammond’s work, we see that he has offered three scenarios for 2050, larger stories of tomorrow that call for decisive action today:

(a)  Market World: This world looks to economic reform and technological innovation to fuel rapid economic growth.

(b)  Fortress World: In this world, if top-down growth fails, conflict dominates the international order.

(c)  Transformed World: This is a world changed by the power of culture, religion and volunteerism, which tempers runaway industrial growth and market-driven consumption.

It’s clear that the scenario (b) is not desirable, but how can we realize the scenario (a) or especially the scenario (c)?

The main question that has occupied the minds of many futurists is: “How can we develop a public policy based on a transformed world story?”

References:

European Environment Agency (1999), Environment in the European Union at the Turn of the Century, European Environment Agency, Copenhagen.

Glenn, Jerome C. & Theodor J. Gordon (2010). Annual State of the Future reports for the Millennium Project, Washington, DC.

Hammond, A. (1998). Which world? Scenarios for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Island Press.

van der Heijden, K. (1996), Scenarios: the Art of Strategic Conversation. Wiley, Chichester.

van Notten, P. (2005). Scenario development: a typology of approaches, a part of his unpublished dissertation on scenario analysis. 

Schwartz, P. (1991), The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Currency Doubleday, New York.