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Quality criteria for visions and visioning in sustainability science

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Abstract

Envisioning how a desirable future might look is a long-standing effort in human evolution and social change. Utopian thought and visions provide direction for actions and behavior; more so, they create identity and community. Accordingly, the discourse on sustainability and sustainable development has recognized that positive visions about our societies’ future are an influential, if not indispensable, stimulus for change. Visioning is, thus, considered a key method in sustainability research and problem solving, for instance, in transformational sustainability science or in planning for urban sustainability. Yet, quality criteria for sustainability visions and guidelines on how to rigorously craft such visions are scattered over different strands of the literature and some are insufficiently developed. The goal of this article is to review and synthesize such quality criteria and design guidelines to inform sustainability visioning methodology. The review provides a concise reference framework for sustainability students, researchers, and professionals on how to enhance their sustainability visioning practices.

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Notes

  1. Different terminologies are being used in the literature. For instance, visions are also called ‘normative scenarios’, defined as “scenarios which are constructed to lead to a future that is afforded a specific subjective value by the scenario authors” (Swart et al. 2004, p. 141), or, in short, “they portray futures that should be” (Nassauer and Corry 2004, p. 344). We incorporate this literature in the following review, but we adhere to the terminology proposed above.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the handling editor, Karel F. Mulder, two anonymous reviewers, and our colleagues Braden Kay and Lauren Withycombe Keeler (Arizona State University) for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

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  1. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 875502, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5502, USA

    Arnim Wiek & David Iwaniec

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Correspondence to Arnim Wiek.

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Handled by Karel F. Mulder, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

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Wiek, A., Iwaniec, D. Quality criteria for visions and visioning in sustainability science. Sustain Sci 9, 497–512 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-013-0208-6

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