Journal
SUSTAINABILITY
Volume 4, Issue 4, Pages 740-772Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/su4040740
Keywords
sustainability; future scenarios; scenario archetypes
Funding
- UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/F007426/1]
- EPSRC [EP/F007426/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/F007426/1, GR/S18380/01] Funding Source: researchfish
- Natural Environment Research Council [ceh010010] Funding Source: researchfish
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Future scenarios provide challenging, plausible and relevant stories about how the future could unfold. Urban Futures (UF) research has identified a substantial set (>450) of seemingly disparate scenarios published over the period 1997-2011 and within this research, a sub-set of >160 scenarios has been identified (and categorized) based on their narratives according to the structure first proposed by the Global Scenario Group (GSG) in 1997; three world types (Business as Usual, Barbarization, and Great Transitions) and six scenarios, two for each world type (Policy Reform-PR, Market Forces-MF, Breakdown-B, Fortress World-FW, Eco-Communalism-EC and New Sustainability Paradigm-NSP). It is suggested that four of these scenario archetypes (MF, PR, NSP and FW) are sufficiently distinct to facilitate active stakeholder engagement in futures thinking. Moreover they are accompanied by a well-established, internally consistent set of narratives that provide a deeper understanding of the key fundamental drivers (e. g., STEEP-Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political) that could bring about realistic world changes through a push or a pull effect. This is testament to the original concept of the GSG scenarios and their development and refinement over a 16 year period.
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