Participatory scenario planning: A social learning approach to build systems thinking and trust for sustainable environmental governance
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP), the collaborative process of envisioning plausible futures, is a promising approach to aid environmental management and governance in the Anthropocene. Emerging scholarship on PSP emphasizes its potential for social learning to enhance knowledge, values, and competencies for more sustainable governance. However, empirical evidence that PSP leads to social learning is limited. We explored a PSP exercise for the Bay of Fundy landscape in Nova Scotia, Canada, to assess the degree and durability of three social learning effects among participants (n = 18): changes in systems thinking (cognitive effects), rational (also known as calculative) trust (relational effects), and environmental aspirations (normative effects). We implemented a mixed-methods explanatory design, starting with a quasi-experimental study of the learning effects followed by a qualitative exploration of the influence of composition, process design, and facilitation. Our findings from our case showed that the PSP had multiple positive social learning effects. It enhanced systems thinking by expanding actors’ mental models of which parts of the landscape they perceive to be important for decision-making. It increased rational trust among those involved in the PSP. It shifted environmental aspirations from being outcomes-oriented (e.g., increasing tidal wetlands) toward being process-oriented (e.g., ensuring landscape multifunctionality). These significant learning effects lasted three months after participation in the PSP. Operational attributes, such as the diversity of participants, the activities implemented, and facilitation, were found to heavily influence these social learning effects in different ways. • We explored Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP) as a social learning process. • PSP can influence systems thinking, rational (calculative) trust, and environmental aspirations. • Social learning effects in our case study are durable at least three months after the PSP process. • Diversity of participants, well-designed process, and skilled facilitation are key to catalyzing social learning in PSP. • We provide a useful conceptual framework and methodological approach to examine PSP as a social learning process.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it