Speaker
Description
In the governance of sustainability transformations and foresight, participatory futures have gained significant traction in the last decade. Participatory futures/foresight discourses involve engaging various stakeholders, including citizens and communities,in shaping sustainable and liveable futures. In so far, research has primarily focused on
designing participatory processes but there's a growing realization that the success of such initiatives hinges on contextual factors, institutional and organisational prerequisites to drive participatory foresight, particularly the capacities of urban local bodies and its officials. This study aims to address this gap by applying co-futuring capacities distilled from the nexus of participatory action research and critical futures studies in the city of Bengaluru in India, which aims to transform itself into a ‘liveable and carbon neutral city’, through the global C40 initiative.
Of specific focus were interviews with municipal and C40 officials, focus groups with citizens and NGOs, and policy and program brief analyses. The study uncovered that despite having a strong prescriptive culture of participation in the city, bottle-necks exist where systemic and individual (urban professional) level capacities come into play. Additionally, the C40 initiative is considered as an ‘elitist’ plan by many non-governmental organisations and citizens, despite the fact that C40 climate action policies call for a participatory foresight process. This could be attributed to the fact that participation is still understood by those who ‘plan’ to be targeted as a grievance-redressal mechanism, as opposed to including citizens in the ‘plan-making’ process.
The study concludes that potential ways in which the participation aspect of a participatory foresight process can be strengthened would be: by co-designing institutional frameworks to support participation, especially aspects of capacity building for local authorities; by co-creating avenues to enable citizen participation by developing new ways to analyse and act on patterns and inputs received from the citizens; and finally, by co-futuring with citizens at regular intervals until the at regular intervals until the vision set for the future is achieved.
| Keywords | Participatory futures; Participatory Anticipatory Governance;Co-futuring Capacities |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
