Participatory scenario planning: A social learning approach to build systems thinking and trust for sustainable environmental governance

Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP), the collaborative process of envisioning plausible futures, is a promising approach to aid environmental management and governance in the Anthropocene. Emerging scholarship on PSP emphasizes its potential for social learning to enhance knowledge, values, and competencies for more sustainable governance. However, empirical evidence that PSP leads to social learning is limited. We explored a PSP exercise for the Bay of Fundy landscape in Nova Scotia, Canada, to assess the degree and durability of three social learning effects among participants (n = 18): changes in systems thinking (cognitive effects), rational (also known as calculative) trust (relational effects), and environmental aspirations (normative effects). We implemented a mixed-methods explanatory design, starting with a quasi-experimental study of the learning effects followed by a qualitative exploration of the influence of composition, process design, and facilitation. Our findings from our case showed that the PSP had multiple positive social learning effects. It enhanced systems thinking by expanding actors' mental models of which parts of the landscape they perceive to be important for decision-making. It increased rational trust among those involved in the PSP. It shifted environmental aspirations from being outcomes-oriented (e.g., increasing tidal wetlands) toward being process-oriented (e.g., ensuring landscape multifunctionality). These significant learning effects lasted three months after participation in the PSP. Operational attributes, such as the diversity of participants, the activities implemented, and facilitation, were found to heavily influence these social learning effects in different ways.