The “scenario workshop” method
-a participatory tool to develop governance approaches to address conflicts over hunting and wildlife management
Background
Scenario workshops are a well-documented and structured methodology, and through project-wide training and pilot trials, we applied this common ‘futures studies’ method to a range of hunting issues related to institutional change. This involved a series of workshops with stakeholders in game management in five countries. The aim of these workshops was the development of governance options for game management and hunting. Our findings concern both the method per se, and the outcome of the workshops which allowed us to in collaboration with stakeholders to in a systematic manner investigate possible and desirable future governance options.
The scenario workshops were conducted in Ethiopia, Croatia/Slovenia, Scotland, Sweden and Tanzania and involved a range of stakeholders and/or National Consultancy Groups linked to the HUNT-project.
Key findings concerning the method:
- The scenario workshops proved to be a good chance to ‘confront’ challenging issues, and there was evidence that it strengthened stakeholder networks through exchange of information and experience.
- However trade-offs between meaningfulness of the process for stakeholder participants and methodological strictness led to major differences in the implementation of the method across study areas.
- In some of the country’s future scenarios were developed, while the workshops in other countries focused more on specific topics for in depth discussion.
Read more here [Link to the Best practice document, and to Scottish research briefings]
For more information: Annie McKee
Key findings concerning future governance options
- The governance of wildlife for hunting has turned into an increasingly complex issue due to a combination of the influence of global norms prescribing sustainability and the fact that stakeholders who want to have a say in these issues have multiplied. This is part of a wider shift in governance of natural resources which have been re-scaled vertically down toward local governments or networks of actors and up toward e.g. EU governance and horizontally across sectoral organizations
- The scenario workshops provided the stakeholder participants with the opportunity to explore the implications of various multi-scale and multi-level governance arrangements.
- In relation to the re-scaling of decision-making power across levels the stakeholders acknowledged problems to identify the optimal scalar level in order to address collective problems; issues of interplay between different levels and scales and problems emerging from a reconfiguration of scalar levels.
- The strategies developed by stakeholder participants in order to reach desirable and avoid undesirable future pathways show, that stakeholder may push and pull issues between scales and levels depending on where they have more power and influence.
Conclusions
The scenario workshops proved to be a helpful tool with which to break down problems and generate discussion. Our findings emphasise the need to consider ecological scales and management levels, and the potential tensions between these, when implementing institutional reforms in the context of the complex, ‘multi-player’ management of a mobile resource.
For more information: Camilla Sandström