Mombera Rising: Using the Nature Futures Framework to Amplify Novel Imaginaries in Malawi

To build a sustainable future, people need new stories about how societies can engage with nature. Visions of the future are a powerful way to tell new stories, especially when they model value systems that are under-represented in dominant discourses about how the future might unfold or be guided. This paper outlines a participatory visioning process conducted in Mombera Kingdom, a traditional community located in northern Malawi. Using the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a tool created by the IPBES task force on scenarios and models to help develop scenarios and models of desirable, sustainable futures for people and nature, we co-produced several desirable, value-diverse visions of the community’s future. To enable communication both within the community and a wider audience beyond academia, hopes and tensions embedded in these visions were captured by artworks and short speculative fiction stories that were widely disseminated to the public. We also applied semi-quantitative system mapping to integrate community insights with academic literature, and rearranged elements of the participatory visions into distinct future scenarios. These scenarios were designed to offer a local case study perspective that could feed into visioning at larger scales and thereby contribute to the ‘bottom-up’ scenario process advocated by the IPBES Task Force. This study’s approach specified multiple potential values for (and meanings of) the community’s landscape, offering an example of how research can navigate, support, and amplify value-plurality in post-colonial contexts.