2008/10/01 by Yaakov Garb, Simone Pulver, Stacy D. VanDeveer · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · Engineering · #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance #Complex Systems and Decision Making #Information Systems Theories and Implementation #Futures contract #Sophistication #Variety (cybernetics) #Management science #Scenario analysis #Scenario planning #Computer science #Data science #Engineering ethics #Knowledge management #Sociology #Social science #Engineering #Business
paper · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/3/4/045015
openalex publication_date 2008/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Scenario analysis, an approach to thinking about alternative futures based on storyline-driven modeling, has become increasingly common and important in attempts to understand and respond to the impacts of human activities on natural systems at a variety of scales. The construction of scenarios is a fundamentally social activity, yet social scientific perspectives have rarely been brought to bear on it. Indeed, there is a growing imbalance between the increasing technical sophistication of the modeling elements of scenarios and the continued simplicity of our understanding of the social origins, linkages, and implications of the narratives to which they are coupled. Drawing on conceptual and methodological tools from science and technology studies, sociology and political science, we offer an overview of what a social scientific analysis of scenarios might include. In particular, we explore both how scenarios intervene in social microscale and macroscale contexts and how aspects of such contexts are embedded in scenarios, often implicitly. Analyzing the social 'work' of scenarios (i) can enhance the understanding of scenario developers and modeling practitioners of the knowledge production processes in which they participate and (ii) can improve the utility of scenario products as decision-support tools to actual, rather than imagined, decision-makers.