Participatory Cross-impact Balance Analysis: A transdisciplinary approach to developing long-term energy transition scenarios

The cross-impact balance analysis (CIB) is a system analysis approach for developing internally consistent qualitative scenarios. The CIB uses a matrix to document how different scenario variables (e.g. driving forces, events) interrelate. In CIB, the judgments for how one variable influences another are represented as numerical values in the matrix cells and typically obtained through expert elicitation. However, CIB has not been deployed in a participatory exercise extensively. The emergence of transdisciplinary research now requires scenario exercise using CIB to be modified allowing participants to co-produce the CIB matrix. Having participants co-produce CIB matrices may not be very intuitive. The participatory process can be tweaked to enable CIB analysis. The definitions of scenario variables and their outcomes (i.e., descriptors and variants in CIB parlance) can be elicited by participants through the use of morphological analysis. The influence judgments required for CIB analysis are derived from qualitative text analysis from the discussion among the participants. Converting textual data to influence judgment is a technique previously employed by Schweizer and Kreigler (2012). This paper presents this novel way of thinking about scenario development where data are collected in the workshop and the CIB analysis is done offline to produce consistent scenarios. In our recent scenario workshop held in February 2021 on a virtual platform, this modified scenario approach was tested. Insight from our scenario workshop suggests opportunities to improve the process as well as potential limitations of participatory scenario methods done online.