A World-View Approach for Sustainability Scenarios.

Environmental sciences have a long tradition in exploring possible future developments through the use scenarios of global environmental change. These have become important building blocks of, for example, the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Environmental Outlook of UNEP. Although rich in quantitative and qualitative analysis, insights from social sciences have usually not been very influential in these exercises. This paper makes the point that these scenario approaches indeed can be improved by a stronger contribution of social science knowledge. It does so by exploring how political science and international relations theory can help to enrich scenario approaches. This is done by relating the worldviews that are embodied in current scenarios to different schools of theory in international relations and political sciences. Worldviews can be interpreted as a value-based vision of the world. They constitute ways of perceiving the world: the framing of problems, the logic of societal change, the main actors, the role of international organisations and the state, and preferred solutions. An analysis through the lens of worldviews can help to structure the interpretation of past developments and explore alternative future developments. This is especially useful in the case of dealing with unstructured problems like most sustainability issues are. A number of studies in which this approach is applied are presented and reflected upon from international relations theory perspectives. On the basis of this analysis we draw conclusions for further scenario development. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]