Roadmapping for Land Use Management

Roadmaps have been used in policy as a descriptive term for any collaborative foresight process of significant scale and scope (e.g. U.N.-led ‘Roadmap for Peace’ to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see e.g. (Rowley and Webb 2007)), and as policy advice by suggesting possible strategies to achieve a desired future, e.g. for the journey to a post-Kyoto protocol  (Clémençon 2008). Roadmaps are generally used as well in defining design conditions and user requirements for technology applications, e.g. using the concept of eco-roadmapping (Donnelly et al. 2006). Scenarios, roadmaps and similar foresight methods are used to cope with uncertainty in areas with long planning horizons (McDowall and Eames 2006). However, structured roadmap techniques have not yet been developed or used in integrated resource management for Europe. An example of a foresight exercise coming nearer to the intended approach in VOLANTE is UNEPs foresight document on the environmental issues of the 21^st century (Alcamo 2012).

Roadmapping is only possible once future visions for all relevant stakeholders are made explicit. Visions, or mental images of the future, are central to politics, policies, the missions of NGOs, and the motivation of sectoral stakeholder platforms. Whilst some policies have explicit desired outcomes, in many cases stakeholders’ visions are implicit, or perhaps unknown. Before embarking on the Volante roadmapping exercise we identified the relevant stakeholder groups, and adapted, developed and applied sound methodologies to identify, elaborate and consolidate their visions, both through document analyses and professional stakeholder elicitation.

Within Volante roadmapping techniques for environmental change science:

1. explicitly incorporate the uncertainties associated with long-term projections; and
2. identify sustainable pathways to reach plausible and desired visions of future land use.

This is done by investigating the gaps between explorative scenarios that identify possible future land use, and normative visions that identify desired land use futures.