Imagined interventions: Critical-ideational strategies across multiple futures in public interest scenarios

This paper examines the critical-ideational strategies of public interest scenario projects seeking to intervene in urgent problems related to democracy, development, peacebuilding, and climate change. As cultural technologies for foresight in turbulent times, scenario methodologies direct attention to the temporal multiplicity and contingency of action; they engage diverse ensembles of actors in challenging conversations to identify alternative ways in which futures could unfold. These methods are grounded in pragmatist and phenomenological theories of time and imagination. However, they are not merely speculative exercises, but make political-normative interventions that attribute blame for problems and credit for solutions to state, market, or civil society actors. By distributing responsibility across temporally multi-pronged narratives, these projects stake out positions on the long-term trajectories of capitalism and democracy. Through a textual analysis of the allocation of blame and credit in 29 scenario projects focused on the African context (1991–2017), we examine how coalitions of local and transnational actors harness the uncertainty and multiplicity of futures to imagine, critique, and affirm different kinds of sociopolitical interventions. We compare how different “genres” of scenario projects refract the future into story-sets of continuity, constraint, collapse, and transformation. This temporal splitting enables them to wrestle with trade-offs and incorporate diverging perspectives while making strong overarching claims about the desirability of certain lines of action over others. In this way, scenario coalitions position themselves in relation to core debates about the relative role of the public, private, and civic sectors in causing and responding to the crises of our times.