Exploring desirable nature futures for National Park Hollandse Duinen
Summary
Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societiesto fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approachesare called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futuresthat embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature.
This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures fornature and people that was developed through an application in National Park Hollandse Duinen in the Netherlands. This new national park isdeveloped bottom-up by a diverse group of actors reshaping theirinteractions with each other and with nature.
Our approach, co-designedwith key stakeholders of the national park, engages with a newpluralistic framework for nature values presented by the IPBES taskforce on scenarios and models to catalyze the development ofnature-centered scenarios. We integrated this Nature Futures Frameworkwith the Three Horizons Framework in a participatory workshop processdesigned to bring people’s diverse relationships with nature to thefore, and jointly envision desirable futures and the pathways to getthere. An analytical framework is used to analyze and compare thevisions and assess their potential contribution to the SDGs. Wesummarize the results of the application in National Park HollandseDuinen and reflect on lessons learned.
We see much potential for thisvalues-based futures approach to support change processes in varioussocial-ecological contexts toward more sustainable futures for natureand people.
