Bringing in local and regional voices

In climate research there has often been a ‘disconnect’ between the experts who use models to better understand climate change and its direct impacts and the practitioners who need to deal with expected changes in their everyday planning (Pilli-Sihvola et al., 2015). With a need to better handle real world problems, improved communication across the science/policy/

practitioner communities becomes essential (e.g., Pohl, 2011;

see also Chapter 3). One way to better connect practitioners and experts and so create a mutual understanding of what is needed in terms of adaptation action is to use participatory methods that bring local and regional voices into the process of constructing scenarios.

Such approaches also provide a way to take into account the complex local or regional social context, where many factors other than climate may be perceived as critically important (Hovelsrud and Smit, 2010; IPCC, 2014). Many non-climate factors are also changing, partly because of global processes but also because of specific local and regional dynamics. In a time perspective of the next 30 to 50 years, the uncertainties related to societal factors may in fact be greater than any uncertainties related to the direct impacts of climate change. Assessing these uncertainties requires a great range of expertise, and the assessment benefits from knowledge about each specific local context.

Participatory scenario exercises can be described as a way of creating boundary spaces between science and practice that hopefully play a similar role to boundary organizations, which have been effective nodes for communication between different expert communities (Guston, 2001). Participatory methodologies often focus more on qualitative than quantitative information. Narratives play a particularly important role, and this section provides background on the use of narratives for exploring potential futures.

5.3.1

Narratives as communication: social learning and knowing in action

In the process of learning, communicating and making decisions, people do not add new information at random to a loose conglomeration of earlier knowledge, instead they construct mental models that help make sense of observations (Kempton et al., 1996). These mental models are simplified representations of the world and exhibit story-like properties (Bruner, 1991). Stories and story-telling can therefore help translate complex scientific data into a more comprehensible format by presenting them in a way that relates more to everyday life (Paschen and Ison, 2014).

The use of narratives can therefore serve as a communication device. Moreover, it can help bring information to the table that is initially not framed in scientific language, including the expertise and experience of local and regional actors, and can facilitate the translation of local knowledge into policy-relevant data.

As discussed in Chapter 3, the creation of dynamic social arenas where researchers participate alongside other actors, places focus on dialogue and a mutual construction of meaning (Ison and Russell, 2007). Such dialogue and knowing-in-action (Ison et al., 2011), where reframing of challenges is facilitated, contributes to integrating knowledge-making with decision-making on the ground (Leach et al., 2010).

5.3.2

What are narratives and how do they evolve?

In the context of scenarios, narratives, or storylines, are internally consistent qualitative descriptions of how the future might develop.

Narrations of future physical and human geographies thus describe possible scenarios of change. Narratives can be articulated in many ways, both by experts, plotting a narrative onto communities, or by communities, constructing a narrative to inform perceptions of past and future possibilities (Daniels and Endfield, 2009;

McIntosh et al., 2000). Narratives about Arctic futures have a long history that has often been linked to political ambitions for the region. They have often followed plotlines of either opportunity or decline. With climate change, there has been a recent surge in the production of Arctic futures (Arbo et al., 2013).

Paschen and Ison (2014) identified two dimensions of narratives that are particularly relevant for discussing adaptation. First, they point to how we ‘story’ the environment, and how our stories determine our understanding and adaptation in practice;

how risks are defined, who is authorized as actors in the change debate, and the range of policy options considered. Second, they claim that, beyond producing data on local knowledge and on the socio-cultural and affective-emotive factors influencing adaptive capacity, narrative research can significantly inform public engagement, deliberation and learning strategies.

Narratives often play “a rhetorical role in producing futures”

(Avango et al., 2013) and this rhetorical role warrants some reflection on what we do when using and producing scenario narratives. For example, we need to pay attention to the fact that scenarios are reflections of contemporary knowledge, discourses, ambitions, and power relations. This raises questions about who has power to partake in producing scenarios. It also highlights the need for researchers and practitioners to reflect on how language, social roles and relationships influence the communicative situations within which scenarios are constructed, and how the situations ultimately enable or inhibit agency.

The constructed nature of narratives means that different plotlines can be drawn from the same facts and that they often include underlying assumptions that are not always transparent. Examples include Arctic narratives about how rapid climate change is associated with multiple risks and opportunities, which in turn create a need for adaptation. Such claims provide information/

knowledge about a particular situation and at the same time frame the problem and solution in a certain way. Another narrative based on the same facts might frame the solution not in terms of trying to adapt within the current system logic but in terms of a need for a radical transformation of the system itself.

Narratives come into existence through social networks across different institutional, cultural, and geographical scales. The specific perceptions of problems and solutions provided in a narrative are the result of societal processes where some worldviews (values and perceptions) appear as more legitimate than others. One can think of these processes as random without a specific goal or ambition, but in practice they may be facilitated by particular interest groups or power networks and emerge as a ‘group story’ that gains hegemony over narratives told by less dominant actors (Paschen and Ison, 2014). Scholars warn against crisis narratives as dominant climate-change narratives about the Arctic, constituted by researchers or experts that emphasize the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically at risk. This can drown out alternative narratives of civic participation, including northern communities as actors in decision-making (Bravo, 2009). This is why a deliberative approach is vital in the process of framing and narrating futures.

The way that time is constructed in climate-change narratives may affect imaginations of the future (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011). Climate-change scenarios tend to focus on specific end points, for example 2050 or 2100. This organizes data in ways that are ‘inconceivably distant’ for most people, not least when there is a need to make decisions now (Hulme, 2009; Brace and Geoghegan, 2011). In climate-change adaptation narratives, it is therefore important to be cognizant of the relations between global, sometimes long-term, narratives of climate and more local, sometimes episodic and anecdotal narratives of weather (Daniels and Endfield, 2009). Situating climate change in timescales that are useful for decision-making can serve as a way to challenge the determinism that often appears in discussions of climate change, and thus highlight the role of agency and choice. While attention to chance, openness and unpredictability might cultivate apathy and indecision (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011), the use of participative future scenarios, grounded locally, offers a way to create openness to the fact that the decision we make now will also affect the future.

Figure 5.2 Methodology for producing an extended Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP).

Box 5.2. Methodology for generating extended Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) The design of the scenario-building process is based on

two premises. First, that the future development of the region will become increasingly interconnected with global development pathways. Second, that local actor involvement is necessary in order to comprehend the dynamics of future developments and for anchoring the scenarios in the local reality. A combined top-down/bottom-up process was therefore designed with the aim of producing local scenarios embedded in the global pathways as described by the SSP storylines (see Box 5.1), hence producing the so-called

‘extended SSPs’ (Figure 5.2). This is one of the first projects to use this combined approach. Another early example was given by Absar and Preston (2015), who developed sub-national and sectoral extensions of the global SSP storylines in order to identify future socio-economic challenges for adaptation for the U.S. Southeast.

The specific methodology made use of highly interactive workshops to facilitate a process that fostered inclusion of local and regional voices. The focus question for the workshops was: What future changes may influence this region economically, environmentally and socially within the perspective of one to two generations? The time perspective was thus longer than the time horizon for most policy-related planning processes, such as spatial planning, but still relevant and useful in relation to needs for dealing with uncertainty in decision-making. The geographic perspective, or focal spatial scale, was on the local and county levels for each of the specific settings.

All workshops started with presentations from local participants aimed at familiarizing everyone with local challenges and to give these perspectives a priority in issue framing. The workshops also included some presentations on different topics that were deemed relevant by the workshop organizers. Topics included climate change, aquaculture, and geopolitics.

Locally-relevant drivers of change were identified by asking participants to write down the two most relevant drivers in relation to factors that would be most pertinent for answering the focus question. These were then placed on a wall, creating a shared work-think space for the exercise. Ideas that had similarities with notes that had been posted earlier were placed in the vicinity of the first note, which provided some initial clustering. The organizers later arranged these initial clusters into a number of distinct categories that were given cluster names.

To prioritize clusters that would be used for developing extended SSPs, the participants ‘voted’ for the most important cluster and the ones with most associated uncertainty, using colored sticky ‘dots’. The clusters were ranked by adding the number of votes on importance, with a separate ranking for the number of votes on uncertainty. Those scoring highly on both parameters were selected as the major topics for the group discussion that followed.

To discuss how the prioritized clusters of drivers might play out at a specific scale or in a specific sector, the workshop participants were divided into groups, with each group given the task of talking about what the prioritized clusters might entail at the local and regional level given a specific set of boundary conditions. These boundary conditions were given by the global SSPs described in Box 5.1: Fossil-fueled Development, Sustainability, Regional Rivalry, or Inequality.

The group discussions generated a very rich material, which was narrated by the workshop organizers based on notes taken during the group discussions and reports from the subsequent plenary session. The results are summarized in Section 5.4.1.

Ranking:

Which drivers are most important?

Most Uncertain?

Identifying issues of importance,

and uncertainty:

drivers of change

Voting

What future changes may influence this region economically, environmentally and socially within one to two generations?

Inequality:

A Road Divided

Four local storylines

Regional Rivalry:

A Rocky Road Sustainability:

The Green Road Fossil-fueled

Development:

Taking the Highway

Global SSPs and group discussions