Programme de bourses "Echanges Universitaires"

Formative Scenario Analysis for the Region of San Dionisio, Nicaragua
Work-shop, February 12 to 15, 2001, Matagalpa, Nicaragua

Organizing Institutes
Universidad Nacional Agraria, UNA, Nicaragua
Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, CIAT, Nicaragua
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Switzerland

Motivation
Scenarios are hypothetical future states of a complex system, such as a region. They are often used in planning processes. Usually, scenarios are designed intuitively, sector specific, and by one person or a group of people. One of the shortcomings of this approach is that often only one sector is studied and thus, the constructed scenarios might be inconsistent with the national and international boundary conditions . In developing countries, these inconsistencies might lead to failure of a planned project.
Therefore, to be able to benefit from scenario analysis it is highly important to first understand the structure of the boundary condition scenarios and their effect on a selected region. Second, a standardized and structured methodology often helps to include aspects that might get forgotten within an intuitive approach. And third, in order to obtain a “holistic” system understanding it is necessary to develop scenarios in a group of stakeholders with different views of the problem. In this work-shop we want to provide an input in that direction.

Goals of the work-shop
The goal of this work-shop is to bring stakeholders of different institutions and backgrounds together to design consistent national and international boundary scenarios with respect to the development of the region of San Dionisio. We choose a time scale of 10 to 20 years.
This includes:

• To gain a common understanding of the general characteristics of San Dionisio, including its weaknesses and strengths, as well as its role within Nicaragua.
• To understand the interaction among the main external (national and international) factors, which have an impact on San Dionisio.
• To construct consistent scenarios for the development of these impact factors.
• To valuate theses scenarios with respect to their impact on the San Dionisio region.
• To propose measures for reaching the “best case” scenario or minimize negative impacts of other potential scenarios on San Dionisio.

The method
Formative Scenario Analysis (FSA) is a scientific technique to construct well-defined sets of assumptions to gain insight into a situation and its potential development. It provides a script describing steps a team must take in response to the current state and possible future states of a case. Because of the strict procedure and a complex mathematical analysis, FSA leads to scenarios, which include a system understanding, and are consistent within the selected parameters (Scholz and Tietje, 2001; Wiek, 2001). The quality of the developed scenarios obviously depends on the stakeholders involved and their knowledge about the region/case and its boundary conditions.


Contact:
Dr. Claudia Binder
Environmental Sciences: Natural and Social Science Interface
ETH Zentrum HAD G16
Haldenbachstr. 44
CH-8092 Zürich
binder@uns.umnw.ethz.ch

Tel: ++41 1 632 6445
Fax: ++41 1 632 1029