Against the Odds: Connecting and Innovating to Deliver Meaningful Prosperity and Peace Pathways

The Lake Chad region in Africa is poverty-stricken and conflict-afflicted and needs innovative prosperity and peace pathways that can foster recovery and long-term resilience. The project I am leading in this region (see prosperityandpeacepathways.co.uk) is co-creating plausible scenarios of prosperity and peace pathways using Causal Loop Diagrams and other systems thinking tools through local citizen learning labs situated in three Universities in the region.

Citizen labs are generating high-and-low end scenarios to bracket plausible trajectories for future prosperity and peace for the region. Developed scenarios are used in forecasting and back casting activities in an iterative and participatory way to derive multiple pathways that target context-relevant issues across different prosperity and peace dimensions (e.g., changes in economic structure, rule of law, security, human capital, natural capital) and outcomes (e.g., achievement of livelihood security and social and environmental sustainability).

The citizen labs (involving local farmers, pastoralists, fishermen, traders, civil societies) offer a useful entry point for connecting and innovating locally in the following ways. First, using current trends (conflicts, poverty, weak institutions), lab participants forecast specific prosperity-peace outcomes and appropriate indices to report against with reference to where citizens/the region desire to be in 2050. Cross-sector trade-offs are highlighted and discussed. Back casting is used to define pathways from the desired prosperity-peace objectives in 2050 back to today, highlighting the strategic routes by which desired outcomes in 2050 can be achieved. Iteration between forecasting and back casting aids identification of multiple option sets for the region (e.g., provision of x, y, z leads to a, b, c).

The Lake Chad project revels that desirable pathways of change are difficult to design – they are characterised by multiple nuances and complexities; they can change as circumstances change; and it can be near impossible to monitor and assess their success. It is often unclear what the policy implications of identifying a 'pathway' are, and how a pathway is to be sold to decision-makers.

Problem Lab participants in this conference are to imagine that they are responsible for developing shared prosperity and peace pathways for societies undergoing climate-conflict crises, but the goal-posts keep changing (e.g., because of new crises) and everyone is unsure whether the pathways are still relevant. Afterwards, discussions will focus on how we can jointly create prosperity and peace pathways that have a dynamic coherence between socioeconomic and environmental priorities, are locally valid and locally owned, and which guide actions towards socially-just futures.