Global Scenarios Group
The Global Scenario Group was founded in 1995 as an independent, international and interdisciplinary body to examine world prospects and ways of fostering a more sustainable and equitable future.
https://gsg.org/about-the-gsg.html
The Global Scenario Group was convened in 1995 by the Tellus Institute and Stockholm Environment Institute to engage a distinguished and diverse international group in an examination of the prospects for world development in the twenty-first century. In the years since, numerous global, regional, and national studies have relied on the GSG’s scenario framework and quantitative analysis.
The Global Scenario Group synthesized its findings for a non-technical audience in Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead. The essay describes the historic roots, current dynamics, future perils, and alternative pathways for world development. It advances a Great Transition as the preferred route, identifying strategies, change agents, and values shifts for a new global agenda.
Key people
Theory of Change
As outlined in the picture above, they imagine 6 different possible futures, each with their own kind of culture and way of being. 'Conventional worlds' outline a world which emerges out of some of the standard 'change' messages we hear about today, and Great Transitions outline worlds which goes beyond these conventional kinds of transformation.
They have a lot of data on possible worlds: this diagram below shows how the data is visualized, and what different kinds of data points mean in different worlds. Here is one example of what it looks like, for 'water use per capita' in 'Western Europe.'
Key Learning Resources
One of their major reports is Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (2002) which "describes the historic roots, current dynamics, future perils, and alternative pathways for world development" and "advances one of these paths, Great Transition, as the preferred route, identifying strategies, agents of change, and values for a new global agenda."
Connections
- Tellus_Institute
- Stockholm Environment Institute