Journal Article

Value archetypes in future scenarios: the role of scenario co-designers

Eisenack, Klaus, O'Farrell, Patrick, Harmáčková, Zuzana V., Mannetti, Lelani, Yoshida, Yuki, Sitas, Nadia

2025

Overview

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) relies on future scenarios in its assessments of global social-ecological systems. Scenarios explicitly or implicitly embed normative positions (e.g., values for nature, nature’s contributions to people, good quality of life). Such scenario values shape how scenario narratives evolve, e.g. through driving forces, framings, or ways how decisions are legitimized within a given scenario. Initial research in futures studies has examined how scenario values depend on whose voices are included in scenario co-design. However, less attention has been paid so far to explicitly assessing the extent to which scenario values are associated with different types of scenario co-designers. Our paper expands this knowledge with a set of novel analyses building on the comprehensive review of scenarios in the IPBES values assessment. To this end, we conducted a formal archetype analysis of 257 scenarios assessed in the IPBES values assessment to identify re-appearing archetypal configurations of values and their link to the actors involved as scenario co-designers. The results show that scenarios valuing nature for itself and its benefits to societal well-being were co-designed by experts and academics less frequently than expected under the assumption of stochastic independence; on the contrary, such scenarios were co-designed more frequently than expected by governmental and community actors. The paper illustrates how archetype analysis can contribute to the validation and further development of scientific knowledge feeding into science-policy assessments. The findings are important to acknowledge how scenarios express and possibly re-enforce peoples’ normative positions, and what role values might play when scenarios get translated into real-world decisions and actions.

• Publisher: Resilience Alliance
• Subject: Academic staff / archetype analysis / Archetypes / Assessments / Biodiversity / Co-design / Decisions / Designers / Ecosystem services / Ecosystems / Evaluation / Future / future scenarios / intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (ipbes) / participatory scenario co-design / Political platform / Quality of life / Scientific knowledge / Social systems / Social-ecological systems / sustainability / Values / Well being