Scenarios
Related terms: uncertainty, risk, precautionary principle, planning
‘Scenarios’ are commonly defined as a description of a sequence or development of events that might happen in the future (see e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary). In everyday discourses we might think through possible scenarios for the outcomes of our present actions (what will happen if I go for this job rather than that job?) or use them to evaluate and select the most and least desirable futures, termed ‘best-case scenarios’ (if I get this job, then…) and ‘worst-case scenarios’ (if I lose my job, then…). Hence, scenarios can be seen as a form of future-making that is expected to offer plausible comparable options that project and evaluate interaction effects tied to specific expectations and assumptions about a future time and place (Hoch 2016).
The meaning of ‘scenarios’ is often credited to the American physicist Herman Khan, who adopted the term in his work in the 1950s and 60s. Working as a military strategist for the RAND corporation (a non-profit policy think tank advising the US government on defence issues), Khan presented scenarios as a way of reducing uncertainty and complexity by creating multiple futures and thereby also several plausible alternative paths (Hoch 2016). The idea of ‘scenario planning’ soon caught on, and by 1972, the Shell Corporation sought out Khan’s methods to shape company strategy.
Scenario planning has become a popular strategic tool not only for businesses but also for public policy and planning to navigate uncertainty by envisaging multiple future states. While scenarios are here enrolled in various ways of predicting, forecasting, modelling, calculating, performing and imagining climate futures, so-called ‘predicting scenarios’ tend to dominate public policy and planning (Cavelty 2020). Predicting scenarios is built on the belief that parts of the future can be known and manipulated to our benefit with the help of risk management strategies. As extensively used by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicting scenarios have become key for national and international bodies to explore and present potential future climate risks and responses. Often, these scenarios consist of expert-based and technical accounts of the future derived from a mix of natural science and economics research (Tyszczuk and Smith 2018). The premise is that as the world is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, the right use of the right scientific knowledge and the collection of the right data can reduce uncertainties and thereby lead to a ‘better’ and more informed policy-making (Cavelty 2020).
However, as Wynne (1992) remarks, scientific knowledge may give prominence only to a restricted agenda of defined uncertainties (i.e. those that are tractable), leaving invisible a range of other uncertainties (i.e. those stemming from open-ended social behaviours). Hence, he argues that scientific knowledge is characterised by ‘ignorance’ in the sense that it does not recognise the full range of uncertainties that are endemic to scientific knowledge. Accordingly, Yusoff (2009) observes how scenario strategies and responses rooted in scientific knowledge claims about climate change have tended to cleave apart certainty and knowledge from unknowing and uncertainty, even though ‘not-knowing’ is a fundamental part of the human experience of the future. As Cavelty (2020, 99), referring to Beck (2002, 41), points out, “[w]hat emerges from this is what Beck has called ‘feigning of control over the uncontrollable’ whereby the confidence in knowledge vs. uncertainty is low, but everybody pretends it is not.”
Wynne (1992) warns against the social control and manipulation involved in such commitments to falsely reduce uncertainty, foregrounding how it reflects and reinforces tacit normative boundaries and constraints. In a similar vein, Yusoff (2009) argues that in their attempts to eradicate a full range of uncertainties in favour of more controllable, probabilistic and deterministic processes, scenarios tend to fulfil political rather than scientific objectives. As Anderson (2010) demonstrates, these political objectives are manifested in how scenarios render specific futures present through materialities, epistemic objects and affects. In turn, they act as legitimation for some form of action through specific policies and programs in the present. Muiderman et al. (2020) accordingly argue that because scenarios perform futures in certain ways, they are sites of political negotiation. This is demonstrated in a suite of work that critically examines the roles of scenarios concerning anticipation and futurity. Adam and Groves (2007), for example, observe how the future is predicted, transformed and controlled for the benefit and wealth creation of the present. Tyszczuk (2021) and Anderson (2010) accordingly note how the future is commodified, invested in and traded in green growth scenarios; coaxed into being through scenario planning; made less threatening in climate mitigation scenarios; made hopeful in scenarios for renewable energy sources and in climate modelling, etc. By representing the future in certain ways (i.e., as threatening or hopeful), scenarios become a cause and justification for some form of action in the here and now.
There is a risk here, as Chakraborty et al. (2011) point out, of basing present action on certain standards that put an overemphasis on ‘picking’ a preferred future and thus project the future as a terrain that is empty and open for take-over by the best and highest ’bidder.’ Citton (2017) argues that the extreme model of this form of projection is that of a colonising mission. That is, in their attempts to ‘fix’ or ‘pick’ the best future, scenarios appeal to precedents that risk negating the value and complexity of present circumstances (Holston 1998). Scenarios, as Tyszczuk (2021) observes, become subject to a ‘projection of power’ that not only predicts a plausible or ideal future but also authorises it through hierarchical and authorial processes. As a result, future climate scenarios might serve as “coercive devices” (Hulme 2019) or “Trojan horses” (Knutti 2018) to further controversial agendas such as geoengineering fixes, to incite behavioural change, or to furnish the “delaying tactics” of the fossil fuel industry (Carton 2020).
Parallel to these critiques, there has been an increase in scholars and practitioners calling for, and undertaking, alternative and non-reductionist approaches to scenarios and other attempts to handle uncertainty. Within science studies, for example, Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990) have developed the idea of ‘post-normal science’ that temporarily suspends the traditional scientific idea of truth in favour of a more critical form of knowledge production relying on the assessment of quality from extended peer communities. These communities form participatory arenas in which science is but one of many sources of evidence, which together inform policy decisions by the peer community. Here, as Marshall and Picou (2008) also write, the problem of scientific uncertainty is not addressed by asking how to reduce uncertainty, but rather: how to make better decisions in a world of irreducible uncertainties?
Similar attempts to accommodate various forms of uncertainty are found in scenario work stemming from the field of the arts and humanities. This work demonstrates the role and potential of this field in creating alternatives that enrich processes of future-thinking beyond predicting scenarios and climate model outputs (Bennett et al. 2016; Hamann et al. 2020; Hulme 2011; Tyszczuk and Smith 2018; Sachs Olsen 2022; Sharpe et al. 2016). Here, the potential of the arts and humanities is often seen as the ability to accommodate and navigate (rather than falsely reducing) complexity and open-endedness, and encompassing metaphorical, ethical, material, emotional, embodied and imaginative registers through which environmental understanding emerges.
To expand on this potential, I find it useful to (re)turn to the origin of the Italian word ‘scenario’, which stems from the sixteenth-century Italian street theatre, commedia dell’arte. Here, scenario refers to a rough outline of a play, or a skeletal synopsis to be embodied and fleshed out by the actors through improvisation. The original meaning of ‘scenarios,’ then, is not about controlling uncertainty through scientific knowledge and calculations, but about embracing uncertainty as a generative force for improvisation and embodied storytelling. This dramaturgical nature of scenarios provides some fruitful insights into the role and potential of arts and humanities approaches, and the field of theatre and performance, more specifically, to rethink the role and function of scenarios in both representing and performing climate futures.
One of the first scholars to acknowledge the theatrical meaning of ‘scenario’ when describing climate futures was the German meteorologist Hermann Flohn. In a scientific paper from 1977, published in the journal Climatic Change, Flohn presents a climate scenario in three acts. He openly states that this scenario is constructed and merely represents his specific perspective, thus acknowledging the synthetic and subjective qualities of the future he was portraying (Hulme 2019). This is indeed a key function of theatre: it is a communicative act which interrogates questions of truth and falsehood. It encourages the spectator to form an opinion of what they have experienced. As Chemi (2018, 33) puts it, “[i]n theatre, truth is not truth, but plausible. Verisimilitude is the philosophical and aesthetic criteria that theatre answers to”. This theatrical approach to scenarios is important because it demonstrates that scenarios, like any art form, are not ‘true’ representations of ‘reality’, but provocations and frames for the audience to reflect and see the world differently.
The improvisational nature of the commedia dell’arte scenarios also created possibilities for subversive or counter-hegemonic performance. To act without a pre-determined script enabled the commedia dell’arte actors to play to the action and let the plot unfold as they see fit in the context of the audience immediately before them (Crick 2023). Each scenario therefore responded directly to the local context in which it was performed, foregrounding a highly situated approach that made a bridge between local experiences and more general concerns of race, ethnicity, class and power. Furthermore, if there was no written text, censoring the text became problematic, and the actors could avoid the censorship of the church (Pandolfi 1969). By maintaining the flexibility in the performance, and by not being tied to a pre-determined locality or one master, the actors were thus able to fashion themselves a new way of life and a new way of looking at the world.
Learning from commedia dell’arte scenarios, Tyszczuk (2021, 13) argues that improvisation “redirects the focus from the narrative or descriptive content of scenarios and instead draws on the dramaturgical dimensions and the activity of speculative, collaborative and improvised storytelling inherent in scenarios.” Creating scenarios that accommodate open space for collective improvisation can expand the role of the peer community, as envisioned by Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990). Not only does collective improvisation enable the expression of different perspectives, values, styles of knowing and power differentials, but it also has the potential to disrupt prescriptive, hierarchical and colonial projections of the future and counter a univocal, universal narrative of climate change. Rather than insisting on predictable and controllable processes and outcomes, such scenario work might incite not only dialogues between peers but also a dialogue between incompleteness and the imagination (Kraftl 2007). ‘The imagination’ can here be understood as a site of potent (re)generation, showcasing "the human power to convert absence into presence, actuality into possibility, what-is into something-other-than-it-is" (Kearney 1998, 4). As de Leeuw et al, citing Marx, point out, “[i]t is to a lack, a space of the still undefined and unknown, that we must turn for some kind of always-open illumination” (2017, 157). The idea of “going unscripted” (de Leeuw et al. 2017) by means of improvisation might thus contribute to producing scenarios that dismantle the ‘grand’ and ‘masterful’ narratives of Western future-making that have deepened colonial projections. Such ‘unscripted’ scenarios, then, may better accommodate forms of queer dispossessions that reach for different ways of envisioning and inhabiting the future.
The idea of inhabiting the future differently points to another important contribution by the arts and humanities to rethink the role and function of scenarios in future-making. This contribution relates to what Inayatullah argues is the most important aspect of the scenario process, namely, making the future real through a form of “futures intimacy” (2009, 77). As opposed to the theoretical distance often gained from scenarios, the arts and humanities have the potential to develop scenarios that “actualize people’s inherent and often intuitive notions of how to produce criticality through inhabiting [the future] and ‘living things out’ rather than by analyzing it” (Rogoff 2006). This form of intimacy is closely linked to embodiment, another key aspect of commedia dell’arte scenarios.
Embodiment foregrounds ways of knowing beyond cognitive experience, i.e., types of knowledge that include multiple senses and involve bodies in affective expression and learning. In commedia dell’arte, the body, more than simply articulating the affect or expression attendant upon immediate speech or lines of action, signalled the many impulses and various appetites of the world, including the varied desires and fears of different characters (Buckley 2009). Furthermore, by representing things through action, the audience, not understanding the language, could still understand the action.
By emphasising embodiment in scenario work, the arts and humanities can provide tools to make futures known and actionable for people who may come from highly different communities and backgrounds, including differences of race, gender and/or (dis)abilities. As Haraway (1988) reminds us, embodiment foregrounds the politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard and of making knowledge claims. The view from a body is always complex, contradictory and structuring and thus empowers differently than the masterful view from above, which is a view from everywhere and nowhere, and therefore less open to critical reflection and scrutiny. Hence, embodied perspectives help us recognise that we might be capable of the most sophisticated modes of analysis and prediction, while also making clear that we are nevertheless living out the very conditions we are trying to analyse, predict and come to terms with. By accommodating embodied ways of knowing, from which one cannot gain critical distance, scenarios may invite responses that are multi-perspectival, defying notions of a colonial and universal ‘we.’
The difference between the dominant role and function of scenarios and that of arts and humanities-informed scenarios can be compared to the difference between a mosaic and a puzzle. The dominant use of scenarios can be compared to a puzzle. Here, the pieces can be moved around, but there is only one pre-determined and predictable way to put them together, and the pattern they portray is given. In a mosaic, on the other hand, the pieces fit together in all kinds of ways and can create all kinds of patterns. Rethinking scenarios from the perspectives of the arts and humanities can help us traverse the fixed outlines of the puzzle and accommodate all these different patterns, and thereby also create more open-ended ways to engage with and make sense of the future. In turn, this might open more inclusive ways of future-making, in which more voices can be heard, more alternatives can be explored, and more perspectives can be engaged with.
References
Adam, Barbara and Chris Groves. 2007. Future matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Leiden: Brill.
Anderson, Ben. 2010. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 777-798.
Beck, Ulrich. 2002. “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited.” Theory, Culture and Society 19(4): 39-55.
Bennett, Elena M., Martin Solan, Reinette Biggs, Timon McPhearson, Albert V. Norström, Per Olsson, Laura Pereira, Garry D. Peterson et al. 2016. “Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene.” Frontiers in Ecology and the environment 14(8): 441-448.
Buckley, Matthew. 2009. “Eloquent Action: The Body and Meaning in Early Commedia Dell’Arte.” Theatre Survey 50(2): 251-315.
Carton, Wim. 2020. “Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures. Whose Emission Reduction Pathways is the IPCC Performing?” In Has it come to this? The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink, edited by J.P. Sapinsky, Holly Buck and Andreas Malm. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Cavelty, Myriam Dunn. 2020. “From Predicting to Forecasting. Uncertainties, Scenarios and Their (Un-)Intended Side Effects.” In The Politics and Science of Prevision. Governing and Probing the Future, edited by Andreas Wenger, Ursula Jasper and Myriam Dunn Cavelty. London/New York: Routledge.
Chakraborty, Arnab, Nikhil Kaza, Gerrit-Jan Knaap and Brian Deal. 2011. “Robust Plans and Contingent Plans.” Journal of the American Planning Association 77(3): 251-266.
Chemi, Tatiana. 2018. A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Creativity. Berlin: Springer.
Citton, Yves. 2017. The Ecology of Attention. New Jersey: Wiley.
Crick, Olly. 2023. "Commedia Dell’Arte: The Mechanisms of Othering.” In Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects, edited by John Bell, Matthew Isaac Cohen, and Jungmin Song.
de Leeuw, Sarah, Margot W. Parkes, Vanessa Sloan Morgan, Julia Christensen, Nicole Lindsay, Kendra Mitchell‐Foster and Julia Russell Jozkow. 2017. “Going Unscripted: A Call to Critically Engage Storytelling Methods and Methodologies in Geography and the Medical‐Health Sciences”. The Canadian Geographer 61(2): 152–164.
Flohn, Herman. 1977. “Climate and Energy: A Scenario to a 21st Century Problem. Climatic Change 1: 5-20.
Funtowicz, Silvio O., and Jerome R. Ravetz. 1990. Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hamann, Maike, Oonsie Biggs, Laura Pereira et al. 2020. "Scenarios of Good Anthropocenes in Southern Africa.” Futures 118: 1-6.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.
Hoch, Charles. 2016. “Utopia, Scenario and Plan: A Pragmatic Integration.” Planning Theory 15 (1): 6-22.
Holston, James (ed.). 1998. Cities and Citinzenship. New York: Duke University Press.
Hulme, Mike. 2019. “The First Vlimate Scenario: A Drama in Three Acts.” In Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios, edited by Renata Tyszczuk, Joe Smith and James R. A. Butler. Shed.
Hulme, Mike. 2011. “Meet the Humanities.” Nature Climate Change 1: 177-179.
Inayatullah, Sohail. 2009. “Questioning Scenarios.” Journal of Future Studies 13(3): 75-80.
Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining. Modern to post-modern. New York: Fordham University Press.
Knutti, Reto. 2018. “A Wider Role for Climate Scenarios.” Nature Sustainability 1 (5): 214-215.
Kraftl, Peter. 2007. “Utopia, Performativity and the Unhomely.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: 120-143.
Marshall, Brent K., and J. Steven Picou. 2008. "Postnormal Science, Precautionary Principle, and Worst Cases: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century Catastrophes." Sociological inquiry 78 (2): 230-247.
Muiderman, Karlijn, Aarti Gupta, Joost Vervoort, Frank Biermann. 2020. “Four Approaches to Anticipatory Climate Governance: Different Conceptions of the Future and Implications for the Present.” WIREs Climate Change 11(6): 1-20.
Pandolfi, Vito. 1969. Il teatro del Rinascimento e la Commedia Dell’Arte. Milan: Lerici editore.
Rogoff, Irit. 2006. Smuggling: An Embodied Creativity. [online article].
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie. 2022. “Imagining Transformation: Applied Theatre and the Making of Collaborative Future Scenarios.” GeoHumanities 8(2): 399-414.
Sharpe, Bill, Anthony Hodgson, Traham Leicester, Andrew Lyon and Ioan Fazey. 2016. “Three Horizons: A Pathways Practice for Transformation.” Ecology and Society 21(2): 47.
Tyszczuk, Renata. 2021. “Collective Scenarios: Speculative Improvisations for the Anthropocene.” Futures 134: 102854.
Tyszczuk, Renata and Joe Smith. 2018. “Culture and Climate Change Scenarios: the Role and Potential of the Arts and Humanities in Responding to the ‘1.5 Degrees Target’”. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 31: 56-64.
Wynne, Brian. 1992. "Uncertainty and Environmental Learning: Reconceiving Science and Policy in the Preventive Paradigm." Global Environmental Change 2 (2): 111-127.
Yusoff, Kathryn and Jennifer Gabrys. 2011. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” WIREs Climate Change 2: 516-534.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2009. “Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 1010-1029.