Designing the scenario building process

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From the course by University of Cape Town

Climate Change Mitigation in Developing Countries

174 ratings

University of Cape Town

Climate Change Mitigation in Developing Countries

174 ratings

This course challenges you to consider how one might lift societies out of poverty while also mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. We explore the inherent complexity of developing country governments wanting to grow their economies in a climate friendly way. You will be introduced to an approach with which to address this challenge. The approach consists of a facilitated process whereby academic researchers and high-level influential actors within society co-produce knowledge. You will track this process in four Latin American countries - Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and South Africa. You will hear from various professionals about their contexts and the different challenges and opportunities the process includes. This course will cover topics such as facilitation process techniques, energy modeling, scenario building, innovation and policy making. You will have the opportunity to respond to these topics with ideas and reflection from your own context. Whether you are a climate change practitioner, work in development or are simply curious about how climate mitigation is understood, this course will give you insights into the complexity of how countries from the South pursue development goals while addressing climate mitigation. The course is free to enroll and take. You will be offered the option of purchasing a certificate of completion, which you become eligible for if you successfully complete the course requirements. This can be an excellent way of staying motivated! Financial Aid is also available.

From the lesson

Mandating and co-production of knowledge

Our approach to mitigation and development is essentially a process that spurs change within a system. The premise is that change happens through co-production of knowledge, which in turn encourages action by actors in a system. We ask the questions: what is the best way to start such an intervention? What could the intervention look like? What are the options for the process design? This week we review the role a Scenario Building Team has to play in supporting knowledge generation.

Designing the scenario building process8:01

Building scenarios for mitigating climate change13:03

Process design in Brazil2:52

Using the Chaordic Stepping Stones process7:51

Meet the Instructors

Harald Winkler
Professor
Energy Research Centre, University of Cape Town

So we've seen that the governing body of the system, whatever your system is.

The city, the company, the country, a state then issues a mandate.

This is normally a complicated piece of paper.

A kind of instruction.

And that mandate then initiates a process and

our job is really to design that process,

so this is a kind of process design exercise.

It was my job, for example, to design the process or

co-design the process in South Africa's long-term mitigation scenarios,

which took place some years ago.

And since then we have designed processes in Brazil, in Chile,

in Columbia, and in Peru.

Each one's design was slightly different from the other one,

sometimes quite extensively different.

But the same general approach was used.

So from the system, a number of actors were chosen

to be part of the co-production of knowledge.

Those actors fell into two broad groups.

On this side were researchers.

Sorry, that's a book very badly drawn by me.

And on this side were actors within the system as I've described.

Either from government, from that institution there, or

from the private sector, from trade unions, from civil society.

So here, you would have researchers and experts and others.

And the idea of the process that we designed is that they have a conversation,

and in that conversation they produce the knowledge that we want to arrive at.

The knowledge about, the difference between the current system and

the system we are hoping to move towards.

Now, what did this look like in real life?

What we did in real life, was that we appointed, sometimes more than one.

We appointed some independent process managers or facilitators for this process.

They were the people who knew how to keep calm when all the conflict broke out.

They were people who were not invested in any particular outcome.

They were independent, relatively neutral, and they were able to manage people.

They were given the role to do so by the mandate.

We also appointed a lead of this research group.

And often in this research group there were multiple universities experts and

other players.

So this was the top grains in the system to deal with this issue

of the missions within the system and the mission's mitigation.

And here, were people who, in a sense, held the best knowledge in their field.

So if we wanted someone from the religious and church groups,

we would look for someone who had the best knowledge about this field.

If we were looking from someone from the energy sector,

they would be the people who run the utilities.

I involved in renewal energy, in nuclear field and so on and so forth.

We would bring these people together, again, named in the mandate,

to form what was usually called a scenario building team.

In South Africa they were about 80 people here.

And about 40 people there.

So this is a big group of people.

It's a difficult group to manage by these people.

And these people in this format would be in charge of the production of knowledge.

But they could also, at any point, [BLANK AUDIO]

acquire the services of experts in working groups who could deal with say,

for example, the agricultural sector, the water sector and so on.

The automobile and transport sector.

These would help them to come to an agreement

about the major inputs towards this body of knowledge.

Part of the scenario building team was a research group,

which we mostly called a research consortium.

In the case of each of the country projects, this consortium would

be made up of the best researchers that country could provide.

And we found, for example, in Chile that this would be a number of universities and

then some consultancies, individual experts, etc.

This group, sometimes as big as 45 people, which included

those who would operate the computer models and help us to build the models and

build the knowledge products, would be headed up by a research leader.

Often a professor at one of the most prominent universities.

This research leader and the facilitator would work

very closely with the process design of the entire dialogue,

bringing the research and the players in the SBT together in

a constant conversation resulting in the building of knowledge.

This large team of people, this great

partnership between the actors in a system,

and expert researchers and knowledge makers

combined to become a scenario building process.

I'll explain in the next short lecture why we choose scenarios and how they work.

But it is really important to know that in order to look at the scenario of

today's system and scenarios of tomorrow,

we deal with an incredible amount of data.

And so, one of the characteristics of these so-called map processes

was the extensive use, especially here on the research side, of models.

Models are really computers that can crunch an incredible amount of data and

they crunch data in a particular way, and so in a way, apart from the people and

the knowledge that people have in their heads, we also have to build into

the process design the way these computers actually work and crunch data.

And sometimes we even redesign the way that they work in order

to fit in with our process design and our theory of change.

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