While science can do much, its chance to travel into the future is still severely limited. By applying old methods in a new way, Jiren et al. (2022) may have circumvented this issue. Scenario planning, stakeholder analysis and space-for-time substitution may all be well-used methods in various research fields, but employed together they open up new research opportunities: While both scenario planning and stakeholder analysis have been widely used in environmental management research, space-for-time substitution is usually used in landscape ecology and has been rarely applied in the social sciences. By using this combination, Jiren et al. show how multi-level stakeholder constellations, interests and influences on ecosystem services (ES) in a southwestern Ethiopian landscape might change in different future scenarios of landscape change.
To map stakeholders’ interests and influences, the authors focus on smallholder farming landscapes sensitive to rapid social-ecological changes…
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Ideas for Sustainability 