Scenario planning in Ethiopia

By Joern Fischer

Looking at our publication list, one would think not much is coming from our work in Ethiopia. But there will be! It’s a sad fact of scientific life that others only get to find out about your work three years after you’ve done it. In this post, I would like to summarise experiences from six days of workshops on scenario planning in southwestern Ethiopia.

Preamble: This work involved many people! It was led primarily by Ine Dorresteijn, with important contributions by Jan Hanspach, Tolera Senbeto, Feyera Senbeta, Jannik Schultner, Birhanu Bekele and Dadi Feyisa.

About two years ago, we individually met with 30 different groups of stakeholders, from the local to the zonal government level. With each group, we uncovered possible social-ecological changes and their uncertainties, and with each group, we developed causal loop diagrams of the local dynamics – particularly around food security and biodiversity conservation. Participants ranged from local farmers (many of whom never had the chance to attend school) to policy experts at the zonal level.

We took the information and synthesized it into four plausible draft scenarios. This is a step that is a bit different from what many people do in scenario planning: many draw up the scenarios directly with stakeholders. We preferred to get a greater range of input (30 individual workshops), then tidy up systems dynamics into a coherent causal loop diagram ourselves; and work with changes and uncertainties we had heard about repeatedly in the initial workshops.

Our draft scenarios were now presented back to the initial stakeholders in six separate workshops, which combined different stakeholders at three governance levels. We asked participants whether the scenarios were plausible, or if not, how could we make them plausible? We also asked them about opportunities and challenges in the scenarios, and how they might be overcome.

Not least due to fantastic organization of the logistics by our Ethiopian colleagues, we had six very constructive workshops. We included a feedback round in the workshops at the end, and aside from minor misgivings by a small number of participants, we received very nice feedback. What I was most excited about is that people really “got it” – from policy level to local community, we could see how discussions between stakeholders in breakout groups revolved around what is good, and what is bad, and why. We had “extracted” local understandings, and given them back in a format that encouraged (and hopefully empowered) people to think about their future; and take steps to work towards desired outcomes.

Our next steps will be to write up this scenario work, both as a scientific paper, and as a small booklet in local languages. We’ll also prepare some materials that are meaningful to local farmers. And then … in some months, we’ll be back in Ethiopia to distribute the final scenarios and discuss these with a wide range of stakeholders. We hope this work can stimulate fresh thinking about a sustainable future for southwestern Ethiopia. This trip certainly gives me hope that our scientific work isn’t just an ivory-tower, self-indulgent waste of everyone’s time!