Projects

Scenario-guided policy and investment planning for food- and nutrition-secure futures under climate change

Current
Photo: E. van de Grift

In the period from 2010 to 2016, the Scenarios Project developed from a focus on regional scenario development alone to engaging with specific national and regional policy processes for scenario-guided policy formulation. This resulted in a diverse set of policy outcomes in 7 scenario regions. We aim to build on this successful first phase in the following ways:
1. More emphasis on engaging with CCAFS policy concerns from a food systems/food and nutrition security perspective.
2. A focus on the gap in research between foresight and governance - who governs foresight?
3. Using foresight as a mechanism for inclusion of gender and youth issues and stakeholders.
3. A stronger focus on the development of longer-term institutional capacity in foresight methods.
4. Increased emphasis on integrating sub-national governance levels into national policy making, and on implementation planning.
5. An increased focus on research and reflection on the conducted foresight processes.

Project Activities

In 2021, together with policy makers, we will integrate results from 4 major regional processes to review results of the BNP Paribas-funded RE-IMAGINE/CCAFS Scenarios collaboration, and their implications for the use of foresight for policy guidance across the region.

In each of the four regions, a new process or a new phase of an existing policy or investment process has been initiated (five in total), and these processes will be further developed in 2021, with the following elements:
1. Updated and extended sets of scenarios with more flexibility and greater (quantitative) focus on FNS, broader socio-economic concerns (see section on modelling below).
2. A capacity development trajectory of several months for key stakeholders, as part of the scenario-guided policy process.
3. Engagement with sub-national level actors feeding into national policy.
4. Clear design of the process not just as a policy guidance case but as a research case.

For 2021:
(1) Extend the Bangladesh case + the development of two research papers.
* Youth and gender. Implementation of the distributional effects in the microsimulation with CSIRO. Also food accessibility + dietary adequacy proxied by the nutrient composition of household food availability.
(2) Use the Bangladesh case to engage with global donors and development banks around integrated investment strategies.

Several CCAFS-related PhD projects will be initiated at Utrecht University as part of the 2017-2021 Scenarios Project scope, co-supervised by Joost Vervoort:
• Lucas Rutting – integrating foresight and governance processes at multiple levels in socio-ecological systems.
• Dhanush Dhinesh – Institutional contexts, barriers and enablers for upscaling Climate Smart Agriculture.
• Karlijn Muiderman – Improving anticipatory Governance for food security in the context of climate change and migration.

Project Deliverables

2017
2018
2019
2020

Partners