Routledge Handbook of Social Futures

Carlos López Galviz, Emily Spiers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429803840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual.

By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed.

This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

1 A beginning A critical history of scenarios

Andrew Curry

DOI: 10.4324/9780429440717-0

Part 1

A woman is newly arrived in heaven, and St. Peter gives her the induction tour. Over here, in an outdoor cafe, Hindus and Muslims are studying chess problems. Over there, Buddhists and Confucians are vying to out-zen each other. To her left, in the woods, Protestants and Unitarians are involved in good-natured theological debate. To her right, in the endless warm sunshine, Jews and Rastafarians are playing table-tennis.

Then abruptly, the little train pulls up sharply against a vast wall. It is nine or ten metres tall, and it stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see.

‘What’s on the other side of the wall?’, she asks.

‘Oh’, says St. Peter. ‘That’s the Catholics. They like to imagine that they’re the only people here’.¹

Introduction

The history of scenarios and scenario planning is a myopic one. As written, it often detaches itself from the wider body of futures practice and futures thinking. Further, several of the more influential accounts exclude significant bodies of scenarios practice, focussing narrowly on methods devised largely in North America and used mostly by the commercial sector and to a lesser extent by the military.

At the same time, scenario planning has also become a dominant practice within futures. Other futures approaches, such as visioning, have been eclipsed as the body of scenarios work and commentary has waxed. Even within the area of scenarios practice, which includes a wide range of methods, a narrow set of approaches has become prevalent. The so-called ‘intuitive logics’ school, which is often a shorthand for the 2×2 scenario matrix method promoted by Global Business Network (GBN) from the late 1980s onwards, has become a dominant method.²

In this chapter, I will sketch a social history of scenarios practice that explains how and why this happened, what has been lost in the process and the nature of the response to this scenarios monoculture. There are some relevant geographical strands. There is also a deeper story, for although much writing on futures is all but oblivious to epistemology, some of the differences traced in this chapter are embedded in assumptions about our knowledge of the future that are rarely challenged. I am a practitioner, and this should be thought of as a practitioner’s account, even if it is one that is informed by a broad reading of the literature.

There is a puzzle within this story. Futures remain a young practice, largely dating from the 1950s. Its methods can be traced to the Second World War and its aftermath (Bell, 2003, pp. 27–30, 60). One approach to futures practice emerged from American wartime operational planning (Seefried, 2014, pp. 2–3). The dominant strand of scenarios work seen in business and military use today can be traced back to this work. A second approach emerged in Europe as a way to reconstruct societies rather than to win wars. This strand was associated with ideas about visioning and desirable futures.

As scenarios practice emerged into the futures mainstream in the 1970s and after, this second strand – which had much stronger ideas within it about agency and the ability to change the future – all but disappeared for a generation from the literature and from practice. It started to be reclaimed by theorists and practitioners in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In writing this chapter, I am also interested in the social processes at play in this process of loss and re-emergence. Part of my purpose is to reattach a discussion of scenarios practice and theory to the wider body of foresight and futures of which it is part. For this reason, my discussion here ranges beyond the narrow scenarios literature.

What is a scenario?

It is often asserted that futures work in general, and scenarios in particular, suffers from ‘methodological confusion’ (for example, Bishop, Hines and Collins, 2007, p. 6; Millett, 2003, p. 16, 2011, p. 186; Wilkinson, 2009, p. 107). The claim was made by Khakee in 1991 (Spaniol and Rowland, 2018, p. 2) and has been widely repeated. To support this case, writers point to the relative youth of futures practice. They note that it has been more influenced by practitioners than by academics (Amer, 2012, p. 25; Bradfield, Derbyshire and Wright, 2016, p. 6; van der Heijden, 1996, p. 133) and that the academic base remains slight, in terms of the number of departments or institutes worldwide specializing in futures. Futures is not yet a discipline (Miller, 2012, p. 40), in the sense that when a subject becomes a discipline, ‘the terms and institutions that define and limit the practice become familiar and obvious’.

It is also true that the taxonomies that have been produced of scenarios approaches convey the impression of more noise and less signal. For example, Bishop, Hines and Collins (2007) listed eight general categories of scenario technique, and 21 subcategories, in their review of the field (there are also some gaps). The taxonomy by van Notten et al. (2003) identified 14 characteristics of scenario-building components. Chermack’s (2011, p. 18) incomplete list describes ten different types of methods. The range appears to reflect Bell’s (2003, p. 316) argument that ‘scenarios can be produced by any and all of the specific methods used by futurists’. However, these claims of ‘confusion’ are overstated.

Rowland and Spaniol’s (2018) extensive and structured review of the literature demonstrates that there is in practice broad agreement on what constitutes a scenario. They list six characteristics of scenarios that are repeated across the literature. Scenarios (a) are future oriented; (b) are about the external environment; (c) have a narrative description; (d) are plausibly possible; (e) are a systematized set and (f) are comparatively different. While the claim of ‘plausibility’ is contested (Schultz, 2015b, p. 2; van Notten, 2004, p. 20), this list is broadly one that most practitioners would concur with. van Notten’s (2004, p. 20) definition, based on a critical review of the literature, comes to a similar conclusion: ‘Scenarios are coherent descriptions of alternative hypothetical futures that reflect different perspectives on past, present and future developments, which can serve as a basis for action’. These broadly comparable descriptions of the characteristics of scenarios also enable us better to trace their emergence as a form of dominant practice within the futures field: What problem did the scenarios approach resolve for the field?

Bodies of practice

As noted above, two divergent approaches emerged after the Second World War. The first is a set of operational techniques developed by the American policy think tank Research and Development (RAND), initially created in late 1945 to work on the future of military technology as Project RAND within the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, and to a lesser extent Stanford Research Institute, now SRI. Much of this work was funded by the US Department of Defense. This was part of a wider trend: In the US in the post-war period, ‘research institutes proliferated […] on the basis that the production of new scientific knowledge could be used to create wealth, achieve national goals, improve human life and solve social problems’ (Schon, 1983, p. 38). RAND’s roots in military planning and analysis led it to a ‘scientific’ approach to futures, using techniques that drew on data and probability. RAND alumnus Herman Kahn evolved an early and distinctive scenarios practice that modelled the outcomes of nuclear war (Bell, 2003, pp. 30–32, Bradfield, 2004, p. 4). We owe the word ‘scenarios’ to Kahn’s later work, The Year 2000, a term borrowed from the days of silent movies (Bradfield, 2004, pp. 4–5; Kleiner, 1996, p. 150).

The second approach emerged in the 1950s in Europe as part of the process of post-war reconstruction. In the Netherlands, Fred Polak argued in The Image of the Future (1973), published in Dutch in 1955, that our shared cultural images of the future shape our view of it and in turn our ability to shape it. In France, Gaston Berger set up in 1957 the Centre International de la Prospective – likely the world’s first futures research centre – with a similar ambition. As he wrote, ‘To turn toward the future, instead of looking at the past… is to pass from “seeing” to “doing”’ (Berger, cited in Cornish, 1977, p. 81). The future is a basis for action that should be informed by possible and desirable futures (Godet, 2008, pp. 12–14). His French contemporary Bertrand de Jouvenel, an influential figure in the development of futures concepts, set up the consultancy Futuribles with a similar ambition. The social base of this work was more associated with public organizations and civil society. The use of images of the future was adopted by visioning practitioners in the peace movement and by community activists. The peace campaigner Elise Boulding, for example, taught herself Dutch to produce an English-language version of Polak’s book.

Much of the American work in the 1950s and beyond concerned itself with increasingly sophisticated forms of trends analysis. Kahn’s early work was based in game theory. It was largely positivist in tone, perhaps in keeping with American traditions in academic disciplines such as economics and sociology. In contrast, the work of Polak, Berger and de Jouven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Editors
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why social futures?
• 1 A beginning: A critical history of scenarios
• 2 Agency: Futures literacy and Generation Z
• 3 AI: The social future of intelligence
• 4 Anticipation: Flourishing for the future
• 5 BioFutures: Where futurists and biologists meet
• 6 Borders: Retravelling Nickelsdorf
• 7 Climate change: Transformational adaptation in Bangladesh
• 8 Collaboration: Collaborative future-making
• 9 Data: The futures of personal data
• 10 Ecology: Thinking futures ecologically
• 11 Economics: Catalysing large-scale system change
• 12 Family: Homeland connections and family futures
• 13 Higher education: The future university
• 14 Inquiries: Healthcare futures
• 15 Lines: Material cultures of future mobility
• 16 Literary futures: How fiction can help policy makers
• 17 Mental health: What can social futures teach us?
• 18 Mobility justice: Sustainable mobility futures
• 19 Multi-planetary worlds: Mobilities of the space age
• 20 Narrative: Telling social futures
• 21 Postcolonial futures: Urban eventualities
• 22 Prospection: Producing social futures
• 23 Publics: Infrastructuring proto-futures
• 24 Queering: Liberation futures with Afrofuturism
• 25 Smart cities: Policy without polity
• 26 Urbanism: Creating urban futures
• 27 Utopia: Futurity, realism and the social
• 28 Visible cities: Envisioning social futures
• 29 Walking futures: Following in the footsteps of mobility pioneers
• Index