February 3, 1999 Geneva, Switzerland The Asian Environmental Scenarios Roundtable brought together 24 participants from eleven Asia-Pacific countries to engage in a "strategic conversation" about the future of the region. Held February 3, 1999 in Geneva, Switzerland, the Roundtable was organized by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, with financial support from the Ford Foundation. Participants included academics, activists, philanthropic foundations, and government officials, and represented a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, international relations, sociology, and engineering. The Roundtable followed a two-day Dialogue on Regional Approaches to Trade and Environment, co-sponsored by the Nautilus Institute and the Geneva-based International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. The starting point for the Roundtable was the recognition that, in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis, the future of Asia is highly uncertain. In addition to economic restructuring, Asia is undergoing profound political change. Old shibboleths, on both the right and the left, are crumbling. In many quarters, people are questioning the benefits of participating in the global economy --at least on "free market," neo-liberal terms. For the first time in two decades, Asia’s celebrated development model, based on high growth, strong state support, and high social and environmental costs, is being questioned. Such a moment demands -- and provides an opening for -- fresh and strategic thinking. The goal of the one-day Roundtable was to collectively develop plausible post-crisis economic and political scenarios in Asia Pacific over the coming decade, and to explore what the scenarios imply for social and environmental impacts and advocacy. The point was less to create an intellectual product than to engage other thinkers and to stretch mindsets. The Roundtable utilized a scenario methodology based loosely on methods developed by the Global Business Network (GBN). Alain Wouters of GBN-Europe was the primary facilitator, with co-facilitation by Lyuba Zarsky and Jason Hunter of the Nautilus Institute. Scenarios are tools long used by corporations and governments to think collectively about the future, and to prepare individuals and organizations to recognize the signals of change before they fully unfold. The objective of scenarios is not to make prescient, path-dependent predictions, but rather to use ideas about what may happen tomorrow to make better, more strategic decisions today. The two scenarios developed by the Roundtable describe different futures for Asia based on distinct patterns of response to the economic crisis. Given the time constraints, the scenarios are necessarily sketchy. Nonetheless, they are coherent and insightful. The point of the Roundtable was not to determine the "right" scenario but rather to enrich the dialogue among key stakeholders through well-informed strategic thought about a range of possible futures. The Roundtable was part of a larger Nautilus Institute project aimed at helping to develop a "common agenda" on social, economic and environmental governance in Asia Pacific. In conjunction with the Global Business Network, the Nautilus Institute will convene two three-day, multi-stakeholder scenario-building workshops during 1999-2000. For more information, contact Jason Hunter <jhunter@nautilus.org>. Hopes, Fears and Drivers: Developing the Scenarios The Roundtable began with a lively session in which participants identified their "greatest hopes" and "greatest fears" about the future of the region. Hopes ranged from dreams of ecologically sustainable societies, regional cooperation, improved living standards and economic recovery, to visions of harmoniously diverse ethnic and cultural relations, democracy, and political stability. Fears focused heavily on social disintegration, including internal political and ethnic strife, a collapse of regional institutions and the possibility of war, especially involving China. There was also great concern about the erosion of cultural identity, the social ramifications of globalization, and continued irreversible environmental degradation. Gender issues came up as well, with one participant confiding that his main fear was that women would become much more powerful--and another participant exclaiming that it was her main hope! In the next stage, participants brainstormed about all the trends and factors which they thought would drive the region’s future. The aim here was to try to map in broad brushstrokes the contextual environment and to identify deep structural forces at work. The group identified thirty critical drivers, including the resilience of international institutions; the widespread adoption of new social norms; the power of clan-based economic activities; urbanization and migration; the lending policies of international financial institutions; and the governance capabilities of states. Participants then broke into two groups to form scenario teams. Each team was tasked with narrowing down the list above to a few of the most critical driving forces, and then sharing their findings with the other group. This was one of the most difficult, and most valuable, steps in the process. Both groups were extraordinarily effective. It is rare that such a geographically diverse group of participants, with different personal and professional experiences, viewpoints, and beliefs could listen respectfully, give credit to each others’ ideas, debate, and converge on a clutch of key issues driving the future of the Asia-Pacific. In doing so, the group was able to reach a common, yet fantastically rich picture of the challenges facing the region. When the teams reconvened, the group settled on nine critical drivers of the future of the region. These ranged from pressure on environmental resources, to the "IMF factor" (i.e. external pressure on economic and social policy), to poverty and inequity. Through group discussion, these were refined even further to generate four "critical uncertainties"-- those driving forces which had both the highest probable impact and the highest uncertainty of outcomes. The four were:
1) the nature of state power (weak vs strong state governance capacities); To create our scenarios, the group then integrated these four driving forces to generate two critical uncertainties in order to create a two-dimensional "scenario matrix". A two-dimensional format is much easier to visualize and work with than three or more dimensions. The drawback, obviously, is that the world is not reducible to two dimensions! The secret to a rich, insightful scenario-building exercise is to develop two critical uncertainties that are at once deeply structural in terms of causation, and deeply integrative. (Of course, given that the exercise is not about creating the picture of the future but about conceiving a range of possible futures, one can always run the exercise again with different critical uncertainties.) As their two critical uncertainties, the group came up with:
1) the nature of economic development (Asia-driven vs. externally driven); To define a matrix, one critical uncertainty was plotted on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical axis. Each quadrant of the matrix represents the primary parameters of a distinct future. The next step was to develop a "scenario logic" for each future to help us understand some of the most important dynamics and outcomes. The goal of developing each scenario is to tell a coherent story about how that world might unfold. The stories that define each scenario provide a heuristic tool to organize our collective knowledge and intuitions. With this in mind, the Roundtable again broke into two teams who developed the following two scenarios. |
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