Dreaming in Colour : Desirable future scenarios for Mombera Kingdom

Sammanfattning: Stories about the future are a powerful tool for navigating uncertainty, building agency, and detecting opportunities for transformation. For communities that have weathered colonialism, future visions grounded in local values and knowledge are especially powerful. Futures based in diverse value systems are also valuable assets for global efforts toward sustainability transformation. This thesis project began with a participatory visioning workshop in Mombera Kingdom, a community located in Malawi. We invited the kingdom’s traditional leaders to imagine positive futures for nature and people in their district. This workshop was a case study application of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a heuristic tool that enables explicit discussion of different ways that people value nature. Following the workshop, I applied the NFF in a novel way to translate the rich and diverse participant visions into distinct, packaged future scenarios. First, I built a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) that represents dynamics in the present. Second, I organized possible interventions according to their expected impact on the NFF’s value perspectives. Third, I used those interventions to build three desirable scenarios of the kingdom’s future, each of which is desirable according to different values. Finally, I gathered stakeholder feedback on the scenarios at a follow-up workshop. The CLD suggests that misalignment within agricultural and energy production institutions causes failure to mediate ecosystem health and human well-being. The intervention analysis demonstrates that value-diverse visions can be translated into value-discrete scenarios. The scenarios capture images of modernity firmly grounded in Mombera Kingdom’s cultural values, rather than the culture that once colonized them. These results suggest new problem framings and strategies in the case study context. This project is a useful step toward regional- and global-scale future scenarios able to include Africa’s locally situated value systems.