The overarching goal of this action has been the development of a methodological framework for creative, situated and co-productive futuring ("creative futuring") with a focus on climate change adaptation, to be achieved through practical experimentation. The result of that experimentation manifests as the production of a "narrative prototype": a fictional "tourist guide" which describes human lifeways and practices in Skåne, the southernmost county of Sweden, circa the year 2050.
Creative futuring meets a profound societal need which cannot be met through the dominant approaches to climate change adaptation policy development. It is not at all that there is a shortage of “visions” of a decarbonised future; rather, it is that these plentiful “visions” are frequently produced by and for academics, policymakers and business leaders, and as a result tend to deal in abstractions. To be clear, this is in some respects necessary: abstraction allows for the rapid and efficient communication of ideas between experts trained to this sort of thinking. However, it is alienating for those without the privilege of such training, which is the majority of people.
Laypeople simply do not recognise the world(s) portrayed in such speculative futures, nor see themselves and their concerns reflected in them. Survey data strongly suggests that a majority of people both recognise the reality of climate change and the necessity for human lifeways to change, for the purposes of both mitigation and adaptation. What is lacking, as exemplified by discourses such as the push to “keep below 1.5ºC of warming”, are concrete and situated depictions of what a decarbonised life might look like at “street level”, using language and situations familiar to those lacking the abstract expertise of academia, policy and commerce.
This action’s aim has been to develop and codify a methodology through which visions of decarbonised (or otherwise socially and/or technologically reconfigured) futurity might be concretised, situated and democratised. To concretise is to make the abstract particular; to situate is to engage with the placedness of people and their practices; to democratise is to popularise.
The last of these principles is the most challenging, but also the most pressing: the role of policy in addressing the structural issues which “lock in” environmentally destructive practices is inescapable, but in order for any such policy to have any chance of success, it must be backed by a popular mandate. This in turn requires that the question "how should we live?" is made legible, and a plurality of possible answers solicited; one way to do this involces the co-production future visions in which those communities can see themselves and their concerns fairly reflected. This is an attempt to open up a space for discussion and debate in which expertise takes no precedence over the situated knowledges and practices of those who will be obliged to live under whatever policies might be ultimately be established.
In pursuit of this aim, the formal scientific objectives of the action were threefold:
1) To gather, synthesise and localise data which might inform the factual background of a situated vision of decarbonised living
2) To design and deliver a series of workshops in which participants imagine and narrate new lifeways in a fossil-free society
3) To produce and disseminate a narrative prototype which would take the form of a speculative “travel guide” to post-fossil Skåne circa 2050
