Developing Detailed Foresight Narratives: a Participatory Technique from the Mekong Region

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Narratives that explore uncertain events are central to a variety of future-oriented approaches ranging from planning to community visioning. Techniques to create interesting narratives, however, have been overlooked in the peer-reviewed environmental foresight literature. We describe a participatory, multidimensional, pragmatic technique to generate qualitative foresight ("scenario") narratives. We applied this technique in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia during 11 workshops conducted in 5 countries and 1 regional setting. To improve consideration of systemic connections, narratives were shared between the six settings, allowing participants to understanding cross-scale enablers and inhibitors of desired development outcomes. A second innovative feature is elaboration of character-oriented narratives. We discuss how the technique responds to ongoing methodological challenges of critical inquiry, policy salience, and agency.

Visions, beliefs, and transformation: exploring cross-sector and transboundary dynamics in the wider Mekong region

“…Finally the results from the agent-based Mekong region simulation (Mersim) model were presented. The model simulates household behaviors that are relevant to Nam Ngum Basin livelihoods and links them dynamically to environmental conditions (Smajgl et al 2013). The additional insights this methodology provided relate to poverty.…”

“…The final set of results presented utilized the Mersim model (Smajgl et al 2013). The simulation of livelihood-related household behaviors and their feedbacks with environmental variables revealed surprising diversity.…”

“…The visioning technique employed is described in Foran et al (2013). The visioning was conducted in two iterations: an initial visioning step, ranking key influences according to the degree of perceived uncertainty and importance; followed by a second step in which participants were presented with draft visions from other local studies.…”

“…The description of the agent-based model Mekong region simulation (Mersim; Smajgl et al 2013) follows the OverviewDesign concepts -Details (ODD) protocol (Grimm et al 2006(Grimm et al , 2010.…”

The Impact of Scenario Planning on Marketing Strategy for Private Universities

“…It provides properties and descriptions rather than predicting a number of possibilities based on multiple perspectives . (Notten et al, 2003) Scenarios contribute to the discovery of complexities resulting from uncertainty in the future (Wilkinson & Eidinow, 2008), and when applied, give a future picture of future plans and how they are implemented (Foran et al, 2013), these images are based on a scientific methodology linking quantitative and qualitative elements, which are important in the system's internal coherence process (Foster, 1993) In this context, (Ratcliffe, 2000) points out that good scenarios should represented:…”