Foresight for all : co-elaborative scenario building and empowerment

Abstract

We present here a co-elaborative scenario building approach, called Participatory Prospective Analysis (PPA) and discuss its relevance for empowering local communities/organizations. This approach is adapted from the French “La Prospective”. It is used as an action research engaging local farming communities in expanding their understanding of their own futures. Three cases of local implementation at farmer community level in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines illustrate how this approach was implemented. They are part of a global project in the field of food, agriculture and rural development, aiming at balancing the capacity to use the future, which is currently not fairly distributed to the detriment of local stakeholders, organizations and communities. Our results focus on the emergence of futures literacy as a capability, its connection to local agency and societal transformation. Our discussion highlights what in this approach makes the use of scenarios empowering, beyond its participatory features. The capacity to use the future has a great potential for local agency, even if it does not guarantee that communities will have the power or the willingness to directly engage in actions. Nevertheless, this approach seems to be a promising avenue for making everyone a future-literate potential agent of change.