Pathways and scenarios for post-carbon societies

This cluster includes three approaches:

• Elaborate transition scenarios of post-carbon societies, from PACT project (2008-2011)
• Participatory scenario development (for Post-Carbon societies), from POCACITO project (2014-2016)
• Exploring transition pathways to sustainable, low-carbon societies, from PATHWAYS project (2013-2016)

General introduction to approach

Given the EU’s ambitions to reduce its GHGs, and calls by European leaders for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 , the use of pathways and scenarios is an important tool for envisioning transitions to post-carbon societies. European-funded research has used qualitative and quantitative methods, including participatory research, case studies, quantitative modelling and socio-technological analyses, among others, to support EU policy-making and reach climate goals. Furthermore, these approaches have a strong focus on cities due to their importance in addressing climate change. One approach, Participatory Scenario Development, is directly focused on post-carbon (European) cities, while the other two have a broader focus. While the approaches use participatory methods to engage a variety of stakeholders, the outputs are targeted at municipal and EU officials, and research and academic circles.

Shapes, sizes and applications

The three approaches in this cluster have similar topics, geographic coverage, methodologies and aims.

Elaborate Transition Scenarios of Post-Carbon Societies is an approach stemming from the PACT project in which three scenarios were developed to capture routes towards a post-carbon EU. The scenarios are very detail-rich and include world tensions on resources and climate, policies, behaviours and life-styles, technologies, as the main discriminating factors. This approach covers a broad spectrum of topics, but its elaborate visions of post-carbon households and lifestyles in urban spaces is especially interesting.

Participatory scenario development (for Post-Carbon societies) was born out of the POCACITO project. It engages local stakeholders in a participatory manner to create custom post-carbon transition strategies in selected cities, focusing on a sustainable economic and social model. The EU 2050 Roadmap for Post-Carbon Cities is an example of an output from this approach.

Exploring transition pathways to sustainable, low-carbon societies is an approach from PATHWAYS project that is centred on two alternative pathways, A and B, which both achieve long-term climate and biodiversity goals. Path A represents continued strength of the current global regime in the context of eco-modernization, and B represents a total regime shift and radical response strategies. Within these pathways, domains like electricity, heat & building, mobility, agro-food-systems, and multifunctional land use & biodiversity can be explored.

Post-carbon pathways and scenarios is not a new topic, yet it surely cannot be considered a mature one, due to constantly changing modelling technologies and public-perceptions of a post-carbon world. A limitation of these approaches is their predictive nature, which means that they cannot offer a silver bullet for the route to post-carbon societies. Instead they are able to offer up potential futures, and encourage policymakers to work towards them in a way that minimises social and economic costs. Regarding transferability, the methodologies in their general form are transferable to non-European contexts, and could be used to study non-European cities.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

Connection to cities

All three approaches consider the urban space as a place of importance in the transition to post-carbon societies. Therefore, many case studies are completed in European cities to create the pathways/scenarios, and devote a lot of time to urban areas in their analyses. Participatory Scenarios has cities as its main focus, and therefore, its outputs may be the most useful to city-makers.

Connection to sustainability

A wide range of sustainability issues are addressed to a high extent, and on scales ranging from local to global.

Connection to justice

The “Climate Justice pathway” and “Transport for elderly people” are inherently linked to justice aspects. “Transport for elderly people” pays respect to “interactional equity or justice as recognition” whereas “Climate Justice” is an own type of justice that links countries that emit lots of greenhouse gases with countries that suffer the most from those emissions. “Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative)” has a participatory/procedural justice dimension.

The other approaches are themselves not inherently linked to justice aspects

Linking sustainability and justice

Again, the approaches differ too much from each other to give an answer for the whole cluster. “Climate justice pathway” clearly links both dimensions. For other approaches it also again is very relevant how you interpret/name them. Additionally, one could argue that just “envisioning” itself (which is basically thinking about the future and planning in advance) is likely to generate more positive outcomes (e.g economical, justice, sustainability) than not “envisioning” - unless it is dominated by partial interests of powerful groups.

Narrative of change

The cluster shows that envisioning different scenarios for the future in general will give cities more possibilities to react effectively and will make them more prepared/resilient for/to what could come.

Scenarios can help to:

• Identify and examine assumptions;
• Consider a wider range of perspectives;
• Prepare for the future by considering the implications of possible futures;
• Provoke debate and discussion;
• Communicate opportunities and risk in a more tangible way; and
• Examine the plausibility of different options and what’s required to achieve them.(p.27)

Transformative potential

When talking about Transformative potential we are concerning ourselves with following questions:

• To what extent does the cluster/approach alter, change or challenge existing power relations?
• (To what extent are) which power relations considered as problematic (unequal, oppressive, unjust, excluding etc.) by the cluster/approach, implicitly or explicitly?
• (How) are these power relations being framed, problematised, challenged, altered or replaced by the cluster/approach?
• And/or which existing power relations are (at the risk of) being reproduced/ strengthened by the cluster/approach, and how?

First those questions will be answered for the whole cluster; afterwards for each specific approach: Concerning power relations just the “envisioning” (of future scenarios) itself has huge transformative potentials as it inherently means thinking about change. The whole cluster therefore - in theory - has a huge transformative potential, BUT the cluster does not tackle any specific power relations “per se”, that again is dependent on the single approach.

When thinking about potentially strengthened power relations through "envisioning in general" a potential problem might lie in “who” actually envisions future scenarios:

Starting from the observation that “official” future scenarios are typically developed from people with power (city planners/thinkers/politicians) a major challenge within the envisionment of future scenarios lies in typical “participation” problems:

• Do planners/politicians even want participation (which is claimed most of the time but not always true) ? If yes:
• How can they ensure that different parts of society can participate (e.g. language barriers; age barriers; gender barriers; or even just the knowledge that one can participate) - which is very difficult and oftentimes in reality only certain groups of people actually participate.

Which then again may lead to the reproduction of power relations (people in power develop future scenarios which do not pay respect to the needs of people without power) E.G A concept that wants to make the city more just (e.g. wants to find solutions for social housing) is not necessarily envisioned by people who experience unjust living conditions (e.g have no money for good housing; do not speak the language - I am just imagining...) and it therefore might be hard to tackle those as the people in power maybe just not know about the potential problems as they are not experiencing them themselves.

These thoughts hold true for all kinds of future scenarios (e.g low-carbon cities; mobility concepts) but especially to those scenarios/pathways which are inherently about justice (e.g the mentioned social housing plan or the “Climate Justice Pathway” - and thus will not be mentioned there again).

To finalise the (implicit) reproduction of power relations between people in power who are envisioning pathways and people without power “who are envisioned upon” are connected to all types of justice: Pprocedural/participatory justice but also distributional justice AND justice as recognition as it may be difficult to even know what should be distributed/what is missing in different neighbourhoods and what can be recognised (from our guidline examples of “justice as recognition”: Relocation of public housing residents affected by climate-risks into new homes without accounting for existing social networks and relations).(p.11)

Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative) for low-carbon and resilient cities

• The goal of the project is to envision possibilities for the physical forms and urban lifestyles for Australian cities in the year 2040 and supports the goal to achieve an 80% decarbonisation by then. Its goal is not to envision fossil fuel free cities but low carbon cities.
• The main power relation that is being tackled is the dependencies of cities from fossil fuel energy systems. This is strongly connected to dependencies and relationships of cities/the nation/the world to companies that extract/sell/produce coal/fuel/greenhouse gases and also has huge consequences on many physical elements of the city such as “buildings and transport, as well as infrastructures including energy, water, food, information, goods, services and waste disposal.”
• The project claims that cities play a key role in global decarbonisation, it multiple times connects the problem (CO2 reduction) to a worldwide problem. It also claims that right now (2015) “we are more than halfway through the critical decade [...] the period in which our actions on climate change will determine whether we succeed globally to limit temperature rise to less than 2 degrees.”
• If the goal is to tackle power relations that may be harmful to the environment in general (e.g. dependency of companies) only to tackle the effects (greenhouse gas emissions) may strengthen the potentially underlying more problematic power relations.

Climate Justice pathway

• This is a very transformative approach as it wants to change multiple paradigms concerning “who” has to “pay” for damage dealt to the environment.
• The goal is to change power relations concerning greenhouse gas emissions: Globally, the countries that are affected the most by greenhouse gas emissions (e.g rising sea level; hurricanes) are most of the times not the countries that emit them. On a national/more local level companies produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but can not be accounted for the therefore dealt damage to the environment; the whole society has to pay that price through taxes or even their health (externalisation of costs). Furthermore communities with low income are more vulnerable to consequences of climate change than high-income communities as they mostly have less adaptive resources, while also having less political influence. This approach is at its core about justice and equality.
• The ultimate goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can be done through global/national/local action plans to reduce emissions (which can provide incentives to lower emissions) or through holding the emitents accountable for their actions (e.g legally - which has happened several times in the last years

Future mobility scenarios for older people

• The approach ultimately wants to find mobility solutions for elderly people based on different scenarios and profiles of possible future developments. The scenario development itself isn´t too transformative. Thinking about future mobility scenarios and the following policy recommendations in the context of mobility might offer transformative potential.
• The basic assumption is that there will be different mobility needs for elderly people in the future that will have to be tackled. Depending on the “scenario” for future developments and depending on the profile type of the elderly persons (e.g “Fit as a fiddle” ; “An Oldie but a Goldie”) those needs differ and therefore power relations that should be tackled would differ. E.g In the so called “Energy Doom scenario”; which is one of the projected scenarios one goal should be the “Development of low cost vehicles and technical solutions to guarantee safe driving” which would be relevant for the “Fit as a Fiddle” and “Happily Connected” profile. In the Techno Boom scenario a goal that would affect all profile types would be to develop “Car sharing services to include vehicle with special features to facilitate the transportation of physically impaired older people (all profiles).“ The ultimate goal is an inclusive mobility system for all the profiles; so different excluding factors are supposed to be tackled; but they vary very much depending on the scenario and the profile type.
• Again depending on the scenario and the profile there are different types of framings etc.
• If the focus lies too much on the profile types and the idea of satisfying their needs based on their lifelong experiences (e.g if a profile type was driving with cars all their lives and want to keep the cars) transformative potential might get lost and the mobility system may not be changed too much.#

knowledge integration for climate mitigation

• It is about knowledge integration from different stakeholders which is used to realise climate mitigation strategies.
• Different types of knowledge from different stakeholders challenges “monopolistic” knowledge that only a certain group of actors may have. The project was done by 17 partners in the research consortium and different people were included outside of the project (e.g citizens)
• The basic idea of bringing knowledge together is not extremely transformative per se; but is beneficial in finding all kinds of solutions e.g to create environmentally sound cities (as shown in the project)

Policy scenarios innovation that foster social cohesion

This one does not have transformative potential in the way we understand it; it does not tackle bigger power relations.

Fingerprints/ Scenario building methodology

This seems too far away from any real content to speak of transformative potential.

Contentwise the scenarios that concern themselves with the creation of low-carbon environmentally sound cities seem to be most transformative as they often automatically include justice aspects in their envisioning.

Summary of relevant approaches

Visions and Pathways 2040 (VP2040) [which is the research project behind the envisioning & Pathways approach] is a four-year research and engagement project funded by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRC LCL). Three universities are involved: University of Melbourne, University of NSW and Swinburne plus many industry and government partners. The project aims to develop innovations, visions and policy pathways for transforming Australian cities with the goal of rapid decarbonisation and increased resilience in the face of climate change. Through its engagement program the project will gather stakeholder views of the dynamics of change and the possible future morphology of cities – their built infrastructure, systems of provision and lifestyles.

Link to other cluster

Pathways and Scenarios for Post-Carbon societies