CEF at the Finland Futures Academy Planetary Futures Conference

Last week the Center for Engaged Foresight Chief Futurist Prof. Shermon Cruz and Ph.D. Candidate Heidi Mendoza of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam presented their paper “From Foresight to Power: Challenging and Reimagining Futures and Pathways of Land Use, and Water Governance” at 2022: Planetary Futures of Health and Wellbeing organized by the Finland Futures Academy at Turku University. The presenters shared the drivers of change, possibile future scenarios and key strategies to achieve the preferred.

The project funded by the Forest Foundation Philippines is a foresight workshop that involved multi-stakeholder group composed of participants from CSOs, and LGUs were capacitated on the basics and practical applications of foresight for continuing, and reimagining environmental governance work. Overall, the workshop was designed to introduce futures thinking and learn by doing anticipatory tools and techniques to explore water and landscape governance futures.

Specifically, the capacity building sessions sought to provide:

• overview of how foresight plays an integral role in initiating and continuing plans, programs, and networks;
• enable participants ideate on possible, probable and preferable futures for their individual organization, and the existing multi-stakeholder network;
• equip participants with the skills to apply basic principles of foresight in their regular environment work.

The theme of the foresight capacity-building is “Continuing landscape governance work amid and post COVID-19” with sub-themes of land conversion: reimagining sustainable practices; water governance: reimagining water uses, and practices; landscape approaches: Reimagining Philippine landscapes.

Design and Methodology

The workshop was sub-divided into three phases: Reveal tacit to explicit assumptions of the future; Reframe anticipatory assumptions of the future; and Rethink, Reflect, and Discern.

Phase 1 involved activities that allowed participants to reveal or make obvious their initial assumptions, perceptions, and imaginations of water and landscape governance futures via the futures triangle. From the emerging themes in Phase 1, participants then underwent a learning process of reframing by playing their assumptions using the dreams and disruptions game and building preferred futures scenarios.

Phase 2 was designed both to introduce foundational but powerful anticipatory tools and processes; and to provide a hand-on experience on using these methodologies. Lastly,

Phase 3 was designed to help participants make sense of their earlier workshop experiences, and discern from the future to create meaningful, novel, and even radical strategies to achieve the long-term futures envisioned. This phase drew from the participants’ experiences, outputs and insights from the previous sessions by using backcasting, guided-visioning, and intimate futures.

Conclusion: From Foresight to Power

The resulting scenarios for land use posit the alliances’ aspirations for several community-powered agricultural transformations for the next 50 years, that can promote human-conscious artificial intelligence, and biosphere-led ecosystems. On the other hand, an eco-efficient, indigenous-centric, multipurpose and cooperative-led water infrastructure, distribution and access systems were desired as the futures of water governance. The foresight process revealed that diverse worldviews and narratives challenges and reframes used and default ways of knowing, imagining and embodying water and land use governance futures. Ultimately, the foresight process challenges how current landscape governance planning, and visioning provide power for the alliance to influence policy, and decision-making processes.

Here is the link to the paper published by. the Journal of Futures Studies.