Foresight in natural resource management: A case study in Australia

Accelerated impacts of climate change pose significant challenges for natural resource management (NRM), challenging traditional decision-making approaches. Foresight provides a range of suitable methods for informing NRM due to high uncertainty and complexity. Foresight processes are inherently political endeavours because they are used to allocate resources and engage in normative questions of what constitutes a desirable future. Existing empirical examples suggest that broader political and institutional settings may constrain foresight in NRM. However, to date, research has not explored the broader contexts that shape foresight processes. The paper draws on qualitative and quantitative data from an exploratory survey with 32 regional NRM organisations (NRMOs) across Australia. It develops an exploratory framework that situates foresight interventions within nested scales, to consider how broader socio-cultural, political and institutional contexts shape and constrain how NRMOs apply foresight and how its outcomes are taken up in decision-making. We have found that NRMOs are using a broad range of foresight methods with five categories of outcomes, including relationship building, knowledge generation and integration; capacity building; strategy development; and normative outcomes. We argue that increased attention to normative outcomes may support NRM to explicitly engage with the political dimensions of long-term planning. Despite this, the broader socio-cultural and environmental contexts create a challenging disjunct wherein foresight interventions face multiple constraints and tensions.