Ensemble Interventions: Public interest scenario work as field-bridging projects

This paper examines the relational dynamics of transnational ensembles of actors engaged in collective deliberations about the future through a network analysis of public interest scenario projects since the 1990s. As a cultural technology for considering multiple plausible future pathways, scenario methods have been used to facilitate conversations on entrenched public problems, ranging from the future of democracy and transitions from armed conflict to urbanization, energy use, migration, food security, and adaptation to climate change. Scenario exercises convene heterogeneous – and sometimes adversarial – groups of participants ranging from academic or professional experts to government and corporate leaders, social movements, civil society organizations, and local residents or citizens. They are often supported by transnational coalitions of researchers, consultants, and donors. While sharing commonalities in rationale and technique, these projects vary in their inclusivity, their aggressiveness in pursuing diverse and contending viewpoints, and their proximity to elites and powerholders. They also vary in the degree to which they understand their work as “political,” that is, as engaged with public advocacy, institutional reform efforts, or broader movements for social change. We argue that transnational scenario projects constitute a relational duality: they build futures by means of relations, while also building relations by means of futures. Scenario work proposes to harness divergent views in order to help collectivities move beyond blindspots and impasse, and toward alignment and consensus on desirable paths forward – particularly in situations of turbulence and uncertainty in which such pathways are not clear or self-evident. At the same time, scenario exercises present themselves as spaces in which new relations (i.e., forms of social capital) are built – through challenge, bridge-building, re-alignment, and consensus formation. Because scenario projects set out quite self-consciously to build relations – as a means of cognitive insight, social capital, and political leverage – they provide a view of field dynamics as generated by ambitious and self-conscious relational interventions. Drawing on an original database of 240 scenario projects worldwide since the 1990s, we examine the historical emergence and transnational diffusion of transnational public foresight interventions through a dual-mode network mapping of their initiators, partners, funders and facilitators. We unpack the relational complexity of these networks, involving varying combinations of "local" and "transnational" actors and flows of personnel, techniques, and resources between North and South. We show how the composition of these scenario project ensembles has a "field-building" effect, constituting relations in an emerging field of foresight interventions, with certain actors moving between multiple projects. We compare how the structure of these networks varies by region and by scenario project “genre,” contributing to asymmetries in access to resources, expertise, and political influence. We argue that this complex relational positioning in a global field contributes to the ambivalence about capitalism and democracy that we see emerging at the heart of transnational foresight work.