Imaginary and socio-ecological prospective scenarios

The module provides an overview of current socio-environmental issues, highlighting the need for systemic change. This overview highlights the need to find approaches, tools and courses of action to address various potential barriers and obstacles to change, whether technical, legal, financial, social, psychological, cultural, etc. Our module will focus on linking engineering approaches – centred on the deployment and evolution of socio-technical systems – with cultural and psychological levers through the mobilisation of imaginations and prospective scenarios.

Given that it is sometimes difficult to imagine concrete and desirable projections that differ from our current realities, which would constitute both objectives and sources of motivation and meaning for change, the existence of prospective scenarios is an attractive prospect. Indeed, these can open up the field of possibilities, create a unifying narrative, provide a framework for thought and action, and thus fuel change. The study of these scenarios is accompanied by a proposed analytical tool for dissecting the issues relating to one or more prospective scenarios, as well as a case study: the ADEME 2050 french scenarios.

The module plan is as follows:

• Brief presentation of socio-environmental issues

• Contextualisation of prospective scenarios as tools for socio-ecological transitions

• Linking imaginaries, narratives, scenarios and the construction of societies

• Highlighting the relevance of integrating prospective scenarios into an engineering approach and examples of prospective scenarios

• Proposal for a critical analysis tool to dissect a prospective scenario

• Case study on ADEME's 2050 Scenarios