Visions are important in transitions to Sustainable Consumption and Sustainable Lifestyles. Their role, functions and use needs further study, both conceptual and empirical, including relevance for governance and transdisciplinary and transformative practices. A distinction can be made between (i) visions in long-term developments and transitions, also used to explain socio-technological change, (ii) generating visions through interactive learning and interaction among groups (of actors) and transdisciplinary contexts, and (iii) assessing visions through vison assessments to explore possible value conflicts and other value-driven and interest-driven differences among actors and stakeholders in emerging transitions.

This talk will focus on methods for making visions for sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyles building on the work of the presenter in the last decade(s). Two major approaches for making visions are backcasting and transition management, though other participatory visioning approaches can be found too. These approaches provide overarching frameworks in which visioning methods are applied. The talk will first briefly review recent developments of vision-based approaches in sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyles. This will be followed by an inventory of cases in which different visioning methods have been applied in the domains of Sustainable Consumption, Sustainable Lifestyles and Local Communities.

The inventory of visioning methods includes: (i) creativity methods, such as brainstorming, in combination with clustering, (ii) problem structuring approaches, as often used in transitions management, which is illustrated for urban agriculture in the city of Rotterdam and for sustainable lifestyles in the Rotterdam-The Hague region (iii) elaboration of visions start via setting targets, (iii) Morphological analysis, in the sense of creating diversity for different dimensions of the system under study, (iv) Q- methodology, a method from social sciences that is applied to study diversity in viewpoints; it can also be used to generate future perspectives and may yield up to five or six future perspectives, and.(v) Making narratives and imaginaries. The talk concludes with research and practitioner recommendations.

Keywords: Sustainable futures, Sustainable Consumption, Visioning methods,

Speaker: Jaco Quist, Assistant Professor, TU Delft

Jaco Quist is an assistant professor in Sustainable Innovation and Transitions at the Technology, Policy & Management Faculty, Delft University of Technology. He has completed a dissertation on participatory backcasting that was published by Eburon Publishers in 2007 entitled Backcasting for a sustainable future: the impact after 10 years (see www.eburon.nl or repository.tudelft.nl). His research and teaching evolves around sustainable innovation and transitions, in particular around participatory visioning, backcasting and transition management. His research includes: (i) Making visions for transitions, e.g. through applying participatory backcasting and transition management, developing specific tools, methods and modelling for this; (ii) Evaluating the impact of visioning processes, not only shortly after completion and how these have been turned into pathways, but also five to ten years later, and (iii) Vision dynamics in emerging niches and transitions. The includes how emerging visions relate to social innovation, learning, sustainable consumption and new business models. Work is done on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), Circular Economy, Renewable Energy, Climate Adaptation, and Urban Agriculture and Food. Jaco Quist has been the (co)editor of special issues in Technological forecasting (2011, on “Backcasting for sustainable futures”) and in the Journal of Cleaner Production in2013 (on “sustainable Innovation & Sustainable business models” and on “Learning and Collaboration for Sustainable Innovation and Consumption”), and in 2019 (forthcoming, SCP in a Circular Economy).

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