Box 5.1 Developing Land Use Plan Scenarios: Some Planning Tips

Approach the task as an iterative building and rebuilding challenge, as opposed to one of developing discrete and competing options along a continuum of development versus conservation.

Establish an appropriate division of labour between the Table and technical support staff, with value-based work conducted at the Table. However, do not isolate the Table from the technical work; link the two as far as is feasible. Consider the task as progressive, evolutionary dialogue between the Table and technical staff.

Discuss and adopt a set of basic guiding principles to provide a conceptual and contextual basis for the scenario development exercise.











Box 5.2 Basic processes of the civics model

Understanding
Broadly informing; comprehensive and pluralist; selective in terms of significance, assessment and action; focusing on preparedness for decision.

Communicating
Understanding and using varied means and media; personal and group communication skills; technical understanding and skills; inter-group or cross-cultural understanding and skills.

Assessing
Understanding of and ability to evaluate and select on the basis of principles and standards, pluralist in orientation; awareness of various kinds of social, economic and environmental assessments; understanding of trade-offs; importance of understanding and assessing institutions both as resources and as obstacles to desired change.

Planning or Visioning
Ability to think systematically and interactively about time and change; historical as well as a futuristic perspective; understanding of time in both natural (geologic, biologic), and human (historic) senses; a human ecological perspective.

Implementing
Understanding how to decide and act; ideas and models of co-operation and co-ordination; integrating the technical and socio-economic, the scientific and the humanistic; understanding and use of bridging institutions, of demonstration, of a research and experimental approach, of mixed scanning and transactive planning (Etzioni 1967, Friedmann 1973).

Monitoring
Generally following or tracking issues and current events; understanding and use of auditing and follow-up procedures as part of all aspects of civics; understanding of different kinds of monitoring and pluralist nature of monitoring; regular, periodic, and technical monitoring and assessment.

Adapting
Understanding that continuous adjustments to turbulent and changing circumstances are part of the civics model; objectives and activities frequently change among individuals, groups and nations in a dynamic world; capacity to foresee and adapt; evolutionary interactive, competitive and accommodating; tolerance for ambiguity.

(From Nelson 1993b, also see Nelson and Serafin 1993, 1996, Nelson and Skibicki 1997.)