A new team, a new vision for the future: bringing key actors together to rethink food security under climate change

For ten years the CCAFS Scenarios Project has been investigating how to use participatory scenario planning as a way to guide policies and strategies for agriculture and food security in the face of climate change. But what’s next? Joost Vervoort and Laura Pereira reflect on ten years of successful policy guidance and breakthroughs in methods and research, and discuss how they will take the project into an ambitious new phase.

Multi-stakeholder scenarios provide a powerful way to bring key actors together to explore future uncertainty, helping to re-design policies and strategies to make them more robust and inclusive. After moving from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, the CCAFS Scenarios Project has been based at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development since 2016.

New leadership

From its inception the project has developed expert-informed, qualitative and quantitative scenarios for seven global regions: East and West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Andes, Central America, and the Pacific, with a team of researchers embedded in these regions.

As of January 2020, project leader Dr. Joost Vervoort will share leadership with food systems transformations scholar Dr. Laura Pereira, joining regional coordinators Lucas Rutting, Marieke Veeger, Dr. Rathana Peou and Dr. Maliha Muzammil to drive the project towards a transformative future.

Reflecting on success and creating impact

But what makes a scenarios process successful? “We realized through that if you want scenario planning to be impactful in the policy sphere, you should target specific, concrete policy and strategy processes,” reflects Vervoort. “Working closely with governments and other actors on the same policy or strategy process for several years has turned out to be key. We learned that only when there is a strong working relationship and shared objectives a scenario-guided planning process can make a real difference”.

Scenario-guided policy processes offer a unique opportunity for the inclusion of diverse perspectives

Scenario-guided policy processes also offer a unique opportunity for the inclusion of diverse societal actor perspectives. “These groups are able to use the scenario approach to not only make policies and strategies engage more clearly with future uncertainties, but also to ensure that the concerns of vulnerable and marginalized groups had a better chance of being addressed,” he adds.

Impressive policy outcomes

With this approach, the CCAFS Scenarios project has developed into arguably the most extensive policy-focused participatory scenarios project in the world in the space of agriculture, food security and climate change.  National policy formulation processes have been supported by scenario-based guidance in around 30 countries – often leading to major policy outcomes.

The critical view

But what are the political implications of such policy interventions? In 2017 the BNP Paribas Foundation awarded Vervoort a grant to explore the politics of how futures are perceived shape decision-making, not only in CCAFS scenarios processes but also in other scenarios activities in the CCAFS regions.

In addition to the CCAFS team, RE-IMAGINE involves researcher Karlijn Muiderman and engagement officers Charlotte Ballard and Kyle Thompson. Key research insights are emerging from this new project, which has made efforts to connect political scientists and futures researchers globally around the notion of ‘anticipatory governance’.

Scaling up through global leverage points

The project leaders now aim to reach global impact by actively investigating and using futures approaches to engage with global leverage points. Pereira: “We plan to work with influential global actors when it comes to investment in the context of agriculture, food security and climate change, such as our donor BNP Paribas, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Bank, national governments and International Non-governmental Organizations .”

We plan to work with influential global actors when it comes to investment in the context of agriculture, food security and climate change.

Scaling deep through developing institutional capacities

Secondly, the project will move beyond facilitating processes. “We’ve noticed that policy makers and practitioners are asking for more in-depth capacity development and training around using futures methods such as scenario planning,” says Vervoort. “And this capacity should be institutionally embedded to make a real difference”. The team will be focusing on different pathways for capacity development, including possible regional training hubs for foresight and anticipatory governance, with experts to provide year-round support for governments and other key actors.

Towards the future

“Strategies for scaling up and deep offer an exciting new trajectory and can hopefully lead to another 10 years of actionable research and innovative practice in the critical sphere of using futures thinking for building more sustainable and resilient food systems under climate change,” adds Pereira.

Further reading

Vervoort, J., & Gupta, A. (2018). Anticipating climate futures in a 1.5 C era: The link between foresight and governance. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 31, 104-111.

Palazzo, A., Vervoort, J. M., Mason-D’Croz, D., Rutting, L., Havlík, P., Islam, S., ... & Zougmore, R. (2017). Linking regional stakeholder scenarios and shared socioeconomic pathways: Quantified West African food and climate futures in a global context. Global Environmental Change, 45, 227-242.

Mason-D'Croz, D., Vervoort, J., Palazzo, A., Islam, S., Lord, S., Helfgott, A., ... & van Soesbergen, A. (2016). Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia. Environmental Modelling & Software, 83, 255-270.

Vervoort, J. M., Thornton, P. K., Kristjanson, P., Förch, W., Ericksen, P. J., Kok, K., ... & Wilkinson, A. (2014). Challenges to scenario-guided adaptive action on food security under climate change. Global Environmental Change, 28, 383-394.