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In recent decades, foresight has been connected to various disciplines that engage with complex societal problems, leading to specific interpretations of foresight. We offer an interdisciplinary perspective on foresight's increasing use for governance of social-ecological systems (SES). We seek to strengthen the use of foresight in this domain by bridging to insights from other disciplines that can help overcome its limitations. Participatory foresight for SES governance offers potential to elicit thinking about uncertainty and complexity, facilitate dialogue between stakeholders, and improve inclusiveness of governance processes, but often fails to be sufficiently reflexive and politically aware to be truly impactful and inclusive. It can be strengthened, we argue, by a more thorough integration with adjacent research fields: critical futures studies, critical systems theory and environmental governance. We distill key insights from these fields, including the importance of being politically reflexive about whose perspectives are considered, whom foresight processes should benefit, and the importance of co-producing methodology and outcomes. We encourage scholars and practitioners to further explore integration with these fields, highlighting the importance of inter- and transdisciplinary teams. Finally, we offer an example for how limitations of foresight as used in a particular field can be overcome through interdisciplinary integration.

Governance of social-ecological systems (SES) involves multiple stakeholders with different perspectives on the system and associated problems, and different ways to value and use the system. This has implications for decision making because this diversity of interests and framings may cause conflicts between stakeholders and/or marginalization of certain groups. In general, the literature agrees that strategically considered stakeholder participation is key to well-informed and legitimate SES governance and to alleviate differences and conflicts between stakeholders. Because SES represent uncertain, complex governance contexts, methodologies that address complexity and future uncertainty are needed. In this regard, participatory scenario planning is widely regarded as a useful tool. However, little explicit analysis exists about its role in framing. We therefore analyzed two scenario-guided policy formulation cases to assess how and to what extent it contributes to system and problem framing. We developed an analytical framework building on critical systems and resilience scholarship: the questions of "resilience of what, to what, for whom and over what timeframe?" are important framing dimensions. As such, we used them as the basis for our framework. We analyzed two scenario-guided policy formulation processes in East Africa, facilitated by the CGIAR's Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. We found that participatory scenario planning significantly contributes to system and problem framing and can add to efficacy, legitimacy, and analytical rigor of planning processes through involving a diverse range of stakeholders in strategic dialogues about futures. Our results also highlight its potential to make the political dimension of policy and broader SES governance processes more explicitly visible by addressing the "for whom?" dimension. We recommend designing novel participatory scenario approaches that explicitly use insights from critical system theory, incorporating questions of ...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, currently existing global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. Here, we use a novel participatory process to develop a diverse set of global biological invasion scenarios spanning a wide range of plausible global futures through to 2050. We adapted the widely used "two axes" scenario analysis approach to develop four families of four scenarios each, resulting in 16 scenarios that were later clustered into four contrasting sets of futures. Our analysis highlights that socioeconomic developments and technological innovation have the potential to shape biological invasions, in addition to well-known drivers, such as climate and human land use change and global trade. Our scenarios partially align with the shared socioeconomic pathways created by the climate change research community. Several factors that drive differences in biological invasions were underrepresented in the shared socioeconomic pathways; in particular, the implementation of biosecurity policies. We argue that including factors related to public environmental awareness and technological and trade development in global scenarios and models is essential to adequately consider biological invasions in global environmental assessments and thereby obtain a more integrative picture of future social–ecological developments.