Consolidating backcasting: A design framework towards a users’ guide

Backcasting has become a widely applied approach to address sustainability challenges when transformative changes are required. However, dispersed and contextualized knowledge of backcasting methodologies and practices needs to be systematized, codified, and synthesized to support researchers, commissioners, practitioners, and stakeholders in...

Planning policies for the driverless city using backcasting and the participatory Q-Methodology

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can potentially bring about major changes in cities. Anticipatory planning approaches may provide valuable opportunities for fostering desirable transitions and pre-empting undesirable impacts. This research employs a combination of two methods to define the key policies to support a transition to the desirable...

Advancing participatory backcasting for climate change adaptation planning using 10 cases from 3 continents

In the face of climate change, a major challenge is to inform and guide long-term climate change adaptation planning under deep uncertainty, while aiming at transformative change. Normative futures studies approaches, such as participatory backcasting, visioning and transition management, are increasingly applied, but their potential for climate...

Gamification of backcasting for sustainability: The development of the gameful backcasting framework (GAMEBACK)

Considering how wicked problems, such as overconsumption, climate change, or the management of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on multiple stakeholder groups’ deliberation, this study investigates gamification's potential in participatory backcasting processes to support the emergence and growth of social innovations towards sustainability....

Participatory multi-modelling as the creation of a boundary object ecology: the case of future energy infrastructures in the Rotterdam Port Industrial Cluster

Finding leverage points for sustainability transformation of industrial and infrastructure systems is challenging, given that transformation is emergent from the complex interactions among socio-technical system elements over time within a specific social, technical and geographical context. Participatory multi-modelling, in which modellers...

Parking futures: Preparing European cities for the advent of automated vehicles

The introduction of automated vehicles (AVs)is a virtual certainty. Much less certain is the timing of their introduction and how rapid the transition to full automation will be. Various governments are already working to facilitate this shift by, for example, amending and elaborating regulations to support the introduction of AVs, or...

Automated vehicles and the city of tomorrow: A backcasting approach

The introduction of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) into cities may fundamentally transform the design and use of cities. On one hand, AVs offer the potential to reduce the urban space requirements for roads and parking, creating more space for high-quality, liveable areas. On the other hand, greater motorisation and the availability to perform...

The Environmental Impact of Green Consumption and Sufficiency Lifestyles Scenarios in Europe: Connecting Local Sustainability Visions to Global Consequences

The sustainability transformation calls for policies that consider the global consequences of local lifestyles. We used stakeholders' visions of sustainable lifestyles across Europe to build 19 scenarios of sufficiency (net reductions) and 17 of green consumption (shift in consumption patterns). We applied Environmentally Extended Multi...

Combining backcasting and transition management in the community arena

This paper presents the theoretical basis and the methodological framework of the community arena, a co-creation tool for sustainable behaviour by local communities and consumers. The community arena focuses on articulating, confronting and connecting individual inner contexts in a participatory process so as to influence both how individuals...

Pathways, Transitions and Backcasting for low-carbon and sustainable lifestyles: Introduction and overview

On 7-8 October, the InContext project, in collaboration with the Low Carbon at Work and the CRISP projects and SCORAI Europe, convened a two-day workshop on Pathways, Transitions, Backacasting for sustainable and low-carbon lifestyles.Workshop proceedings have just become available as SCORAI workshop proceedings on the SCORAI website at http:/...

Sustainable innovation backcasting and participatory decision making

Participatory intervention methods can be seen as tools to solve the problems that are the results of locked-in institutional practices. To repair such institutional problems, participatory tools have to address three sets of questions.First, who to select as a participant, and what is the function of the selected participants? Second, how can...

Future visions for heating and washing practices in Irish households: A discussion of the methodological framework employed by the Consensus Research Project Ruth Doyle

This paper reflects on the methodological framework employed by an Irish research project, Consensus (www.consensus.ie) in its examination of sustainable water and energy consumption in Irish households. A key criticism of conventional policy responses aimed at promoting sustainable consumption is that they yield only incremental changes rather...

Sustainable innovation backcasting and participatory decision making: The road from intervention to innovation

Participatory intervention methods can be seen as tools to solve the problems that are the results of locked-in institutional practices. To repair such institutional problems, participatory tools have to address three sets of questions.First, who to select as a participant, and what is the function of the selected participants? Second, how can...