Imagining and Mapping UK Green Economy Futures

The project

The Complexity Appropriate Participatory Techniques Utilised for Reimagining Energy policy Design (CAPTURED) project used participatory methods to engage policymakers, planners, and analysts from the public, private, and third sectors in the UK, who were experts in domains such as the green economy, green finance, net zero, and sustainability, to envision alternative UK green economy futures leading up to 2050. The work helped uncover narratives of green economy futures by minimally and maximally extrapolating relevant current signals and trends – emerging and more established indications of change – and mapping them along Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political (STEEP) dimensions.

The study combined an online survey with two in-person participatory workshops – the first focused on horizon scanning, and the second on scenario planning and backcasting. In the first workshop, participants identified signals and trends relevant to the green economy. Trends were described as patterns of change already underway and widely recognised – see, for example, this Go-Science trend deck. Signals, on the other hand, are early indications of change that are not yet well established but may evolve into trends. In the second workshop, through structured deliberation activities, participants developed and mapped a range of green economy scenarios, including preferable (desirable future states), probable (likely future states based on current trends), plausible (reasonable extrapolations of future states based on current trends), and possible (broader imagined future states) scenarios – see figure 1.

Figure : CAPTURED illustration of a Futures Cone, drawing on other Futures Cone illustrations (source1, source2 and source3)

Insights from the workshops are informing the CAPTURED team’s upcoming report on potential trajectories for the UK’s green economy transition. The report will unpack a broad range of interlinked social, technological, economic, environmental and political factors shaping this transition. Stay tuned for updates as the CAPTURED report is expected to launch later this year. The CAPTURED project is funded by the Warwick Policy Support fund 24–25.