Early in my PhD studies I reviewed the literature on so-called ‘foresight’ practices such as on scenario-building, scenario-based planning, and techno-economic modelling. What came through clearly is that there is a dominant set of ideas about these practices. These ideas can be termed the received wisdom. These ideas include that foresight methods and practices are …
Tag: Scenarios
Has Paul Gilding lost the plot?
Former Greenpeace International Executive Director, Paul Gilding, has written a new blog post entitled “Don’t be Fossil Fooled – It’s Time to Say Goodbye”. He claims that “the fossil fuel energy industry [and not just in Australia, the global fossil fuel industry] is now entering terminal decline and will be all but gone within 15-30 years” …
The Population Bomb revisited – again
It’s a bit too soon, arguably, to do a full postmortem on the book The Population Bomb and especially on related debates – given the global population continues to rapidly rise and is heading towards 9 or 9.5 billion by mid-century – but lately I spotted some interesting revisiting of the book, its impacts, and …
Worst case scenarios – how should we deal with low-probability risks of disaster?
Worse case scenarios are an important part of sustainability discourses which I’ve recently been prompted to consider more deeply. Indeed Cass Sunstein – in his book Worst Case Scenarios (published by Harvard University Press in 2007) – talks about “worse-case specialists”, a group which he contends includes environmentalists (along with many others such as those …
Rhetoric Versus reality in the use of scenario-based techniques
Scholars examining the increasing use of scenario-based techniques have recently argued that most existing writing on the use of these techniques fails to substantively address the potential pitfalls of such techniques. In this post I want to raise a specific issue: it has been argued that effectively conducting scenario planning “requires unbiased consideration of multiple …
Interpretive processes and meaning making in scenario exercises
I’m currently doing some interviews for a case study that I’m developing as part of my PhD. This ‘case’ will focus on the Future Fuels Forum run by the CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship (external link), which was run from November 2007-June 2008. During this period oil prices shot up (see Figure below) and surged to …
What is ‘new’ about ‘foresight’?
Prominent areas of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology often get accused of essentially being “old wine in new bottles” – that is, of repackaging an old product as a new one, or more crudely put as just being spin (empty marketing terms). In contrast, others contend that something significantly new is happening which …
Sustainability impasses and futures practices
How can ‘sustainability impasses’ be best understood and dealt with (ideally broken)? This increasingly seems like one of the most important questions. Just look at the situations of (mostly) inaction and major, increasing conflicts around the management of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia over the proposed ‘Basin Plan’ for more sustainable water use, over major …
Reconsidering the Shell scenarios case study
Recently I’ve been reading Art Kleiner’s influential book The Age of Heretics, and Kees van der Heijden’s Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversations, which both consider Shell’s early experiments in the 1970s with scenarios and scenario-based planning techniques. These books both highlight that there is much more to this case than the simple “success story” …