Showing papers in "Futures in 2008"

TL;DR: In this paper, a backcasting approach with local stakeholders in five European cities where several Images of the Future were formulated for household consumption in sustainable cities was used to find methods for inspiring local stakeholders to participate in discussions about sustainability with a long-term perspective.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose five characteristics of "issue-driven interdisciplinarity" in the sustainability field: being problem-based, integration, interactivity and emergence, reflexivity, and strong forms of collaboration and partnership.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated drivers of change in the shifting knowledge landscape, and note disparate drivers that plot different courses for transdisciplinarity, including the knowledge economy, the environmental imperative, and the engaged populace.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors point out that as India moves towards stricter regulation of industrial effluents to control water pollution greater efforts are required to reduce the risk to public health as toxic pollutants which are mainly colourless and odourless can be expected to be released into the ecosystems.

TL;DR: A new starting point for defining weak signals (signs) is introduced by using the novel concept future sign, which consists of three dimensions: the signal, the issue and the interpretation.

TL;DR: In this paper, a case study about the emerging biofuels sector in Tanzania is presented, where the authors apply SNA techniques to generate more in-depth insights into the composition and functioning of the actor network and how this affects the innovation performance and development prospects.

TL;DR: This paper argues that because transport is a derived demand, it must first articulate a preferred vision of the future, then design an appropriate, sustainable transport system, and briefly outlines what such a low-mobility future transport system would look like.

TL;DR: The Delphi study as mentioned in this paper suggests that futures studies will become more important in German corporations and suggests that the improvement of methods like environmental scanning, trend research, trend monitoring, strategic early warning and the scenario technique are suggested.

TL;DR: Integral futures (IF) has developed over several years to a point where it has emerged as a productive way of understanding futures studies (FS) itself and re-evaluating its role in the wider world as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, an extension of the Fisher-Pry substitution model was used to account for the observed historical shifts of primary energy use from sources of wood, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the adoption of cohousing in the USA, using diffusion theories and found that grass-roots approaches to the creation of cohouse communities are likely to result in the greatest number of adoptions in the future.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined how India's remote drylands can be transformed to achieve a sustainable green revolution to meet India's future food demands without creating serious negative consequences to natural environment.

TL;DR: The authors sketches the broad outlines of the philosophical and methodological foundations of an emerging approach to inquiry called integral inquiry and how this form of inquiry may be applied to futures studies, leading to an approach which has come to be called integral futures.

TL;DR: In this paper, a case analysis of a successful scenario intervention in an organization is presented and contrasted with an unsuccessful one reported in Hodgkinson and Wright [Confronting strategic inertia in a top management team: learning from failure, Organization Studies 23 (2002)949-977].

TL;DR: In this article, the causal mechanisms for the long wave of economic development are classified based on level of analysis, which allows researchers to more easily draw from various fields and establish needed consensus in long wave theory.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the differences between CLA and Integral Theory and find that from an Integral perspective, the layers in CLA confuse quadrants, developmental levels and developmental lines.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate China's current engagement in Africa and its consequences and question whether China's engagements in Africa are purely extractive or have a developmental impact, and look in some detail at these real and possible impacts.

TL;DR: In this paper, the use of systems methodology in futures studies and foresight, in relation to Slaughter's call for Integral methodological renewal in future studies, is examined for their potential to address concerns about the reduction of interior realities to epiphenomena of systemic processes, articulated by Habermas in the 1970s, and more recently by Wilber from the perspective of his Integral Methodological Pluralism.

TL;DR: This paper contextualises integral scenarios with a summary of the theoretical background to their development before arriving at a generic scenario generation process together with a set of utility and quality criteria.

TL;DR: Complex systems scientists must make an obvious added-value contribution to policy, making explicit their role as designers with their science fitting into the policy-driven process of designing, planning, managing and controlling real complex socio-technical systems.

TL;DR: However, despite their economic clout, the emerging powers of the global South have done little to challenge the Euro-North American domination of the international stage, leaving that task to Bolivia, Venezuela, and Iran as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: The twenty-first century momentum of globalization is markedly different from the twentieth century globalization (a new geography of trade, weaker hegemony, and growing multipolarity) and presents major questions as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The authors argues that global collapse is a possibility in the 21st century, because of the numerous good reasons to postpone societal response, the inertia in the climate system, and there exist self-reinforcing mechanisms that may lead to a runaway temperature increase once certain thresholds are surpassed.

TL;DR: The paper shows how coordination can offer a resolution of the question of sociality in the context of design, and discusses the effects of such an approach for the understanding of the relationship between complexity and design.

TL;DR: In this paper, an action research in the regional subsidiary of an MNC in Turkey was carried out to address the gap of the implementation of corporate foresight in regional subsidiaries of MNCs in emerging markets.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose to design scenarios as action processes to anticipate new rules to be played in prospective future scenarios, and analyse the interaction between actors' projects and scenarios, showing that actors have to navigate through rule shifts rather than to oppose alternative scenarios.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss fundamental concepts in economics, such as efficiency and optimality, in relation to the incorporation of future generations in present day decision-making, and investigate alternative approaches, in which, unlike in CBA, the preferences are not assumed to be a priori but must be constructed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the author deals with feminist engagement with the futures studies and analyses the uneasy relationship that exists between the two, and investigates the feminist theorizing of "patriarchal time" and efforts to both decolonise and reconstruct time based on feminist epistemological frameworks.