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As the North West coast of Tasmania, Australia, has deindustrialised, the region's unions have lost membership, power and relevance. This process of deindustrialisation opens up possibilities for the unions to become involved in regeneration as regional development actors and, by moving outside the workplace and engaging with the community, renew and revitalise themselves. But many unions have found it difficult to move beyond their traditional forms of action and relationships. This article uses the concept of lock-in, and draws on semi-structured interviews, two forums and a workshop, to detail the way the North West coast unions attempted to break from the confines of the workplace and out into the community. Their attempts to do this were uneven and contested. They were, to varying degrees, locked-in and constrained by their traditional relationships with politicians and their own members. At another level they were locked-out from participating in regeneration decisions by long standing relationships between governments and business and their antagonism towards the unions. Although the unions attempted to reimagine themselves, there remained a pattern of regional lock-in where long-standing relationships continued and limited and hindered the unions' ability to participate in regeneration debates and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we outline and discuss a novel augmentation of scenario method combined with Delphi analysis to engage multiple actors in analyzing complex and contested problems. In particular, we present ‘branching scenarios’ as an approach that breaks potential chains of perceived causality from the national/global level to drive local outcomes. The approach focuses on generating debate on local agency. The project discussed formed part of a larger research program in North West Tasmania to study the possible processes for economic and social regeneration. In engaging key stakeholders from public, private and non-governmental organizations, the team faced issues associated with participants' geographical dispersal and lack of time. In addition, the region may be considered as characterized by ‘lock-in’ to extant structures and, perhaps, resistant to the change necessary to achieve economic regeneration. For these reasons, our scenario intervention was deliberately designed to provide a cognitive ‘jolt’ to these senior, time-poor individuals - seeking to prompt their articulated action to achieve the jointly-held goal, regeneration. We document our approach and evaluate and analyze the degree to which we achieved this jointly-desired outcome. We present a new conceptual framework for broad social inquiry that will promote deep stakeholder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]