Laura Pereira

Organising a safe space for navigating social-ecological transformations to sustainability.

The need for developing socially just living conditions for the world’s growing population whilst keeping human societies within a ‘safe operating space’ has become a modern imperative. This requires transformative changes in the dominant social norms, behaviours, governance and management regimes that guide human responses in areas such as urban ecology, public health, resource security (e.g., food, water, energy access), economic development and biodiversity conservation. However, such systemic transformations necessitate experimentation in public arenas of exchange and a deepening of processes that can widen multi-stakeholder learning. We argue that there is an emergent potential in bridging the sustainability transitions and resilience approaches to create new scientific capacity that can support large-scale social-ecological transformations (SETs) to sustainability globally, not just in the West. In this article, we elucidate a set of guiding principles for the design of a ‘safe space’ to encourage stronger interactions between these research areas and others that are relevant to the challenges faced. We envisage new opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration that will develop an adaptive and evolving community of practice. In particular, we emphasise the great opportunity for engaging with the role of emerging economies in facilitating safe space experimentation.

Multiscale scenarios for nature futures

Targets for human development are increasingly connected with targets for nature, however, existing scenarios do not explicitly address this relationship. Here, we outline a strategy to generate scenarios centred on our relationship with nature to inform decision-making at multiple scales.

Governance Arrangements for the Future Food System: Addressing Complexity in South Africa

Governance Arrangements for the Future Food System: Addressing Complexity in South Africa Laura Pereira & Scott Drimie To cite this article: Laura Pereira & Scott Drimie (2016) Governance Arrangements for the Future Food System: Addressing Complexity in South Africa, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 58:4, 18-31, DOI: 10.1080/00139157.2016.1186438 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2016.1186438

Using futures methods to create transformative spaces: visions of a good Anthropocene in southern Africa

The unique challenges posed by the Anthropocene require creative ways of engaging with the future and bringing about transformative change. Envisioning positive futures is a first step in creating a shared understanding and commitment that enables radical transformations toward sustainability in a world defined by complexity, diversity, and uncertainty. However, to create a transformative space in which truly unknowable futures can be explored, new experimental approaches are needed that go beyond merely extrapolating from the present into archetypal scenarios of the future. Here, we present a process of creative visioning where participatory methods and tools from the field of futures studies were combined in a novel way to create and facilitate a transformative space, with the aim of generating positive narrative visions for southern Africa. We convened a diverse group of participants in a workshop designed to develop radically different scenarios of good Anthropocenes, based on existing “seeds” of the future in the present. These seeds are innovative initiatives, practices, and ideas that are present in the world today, but are not currently widespread or dominant. As a result of a carefully facilitated process that encouraged a multiplicity of perspectives, creative immersion, and grappling with deeply held assumptions, four radical visions for southern Africa were produced. Although these futures are highly innovative and exploratory, they still link back to current real-world initiatives and contexts. The key learning that arose from this experience was the importance of the imagination for transformative thinking, the need to capitalize on diversity to push boundaries, and finally, the importance of creating a space that enables participants to engage with emotions, beliefs, and complexity. This method of engagement with the future has the potential to create transformative spaces that inspire and empower people to act toward positive Anthropocene visions despite the complexity of the sustainability challenge.

Agroecology: The Future of Sustainable Farming?

Koen Dekeyser, 2016The world is entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where humans are believed to be responsible for having as much of an impact on the earths system as geological pr...

Cassava bread in Nigeria: the potential of 'orphan crop' innovation for building more resilient food systems

Achieving global food security sustainably is a great challenge in the 21st century. This paper proposes that orphan crop innovation has the potential to help address this need. Using the case study of cassava bread in Nigeria, it demonstrates the barriers to and mechanisms for developing innovation systems for orphan crops. It finds that the goal-oriented search for cassava bread was successful, but the wider systemic weakness that its invention was supposed to address required further interventions. Furthermore, when the benefits of a specific product do not accrue directly to the end-users, but are felt further up the supply chain, it is difficult to incentivise the private sector to invest in these types of innovation because there is no clear target market. This requires collaboration and trust between public and private sector actors, which is especially important due to ethical concerns in bridging formal technological innovation with traditional knowledge systems.