Managing Alaska's National Parks in an era of uncertainty: an evaluation of scenario planning workshops

Scenario planning is a flexible tool used to assess a broad range of plausible, relevant, divergent, and challenging futures, for short-term responses and long-term planning. Scenario planning has gained popularity in natural resource management for addressing uncertainties associated with climate change, but the literature contains few retrospective assessments of scenario planning. In this paper, we use a case study of a climate change scenario planning process conducted by National Park Service in Alaska to evaluate this tool and its outcomes. Five planning workshops, each addressing an Inventory and Monitoring Network in Alaska, were held between 2010 and 2012. In 2015, we conducted 30 interviews with workshop participants to evaluate the outcomes of these workshops. Participants described individual outcomes, including increased knowledge of climate change, increased awareness of uncertainty, and the ability to learn from others across disciplines and backgrounds. Challenges include ensuring adequate feedback and follow-through after the initial process, making products tangible and meaningful to participants, and providing specific mechanisms for applying the process beyond the workshop. The evaluation showed that the workshops were well organized and facilitated, and that they fostered individual learning and helped participants develop adaptive capacity. Suggestions for improvement included institutionalizing the process so that it can have more impact at the organizational level, and recognizing and preparing for the challenges of co-production of knowledge.