420 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
example of science fiction to illustrate the relevance of one non-academic, popular-
culture form of vision creation.
Broadening content and form
Enriching the content of future visions and broadening participation may be
addressed on several levels. Although the ideal is a wide-ranging democratic discus-
sion – taking place in the world’s cities and villages, fields and marketplaces, bars
and watering-holes, schools and workplaces, meetings and media outlets – even
the confines of policy circles and academia provide ample scope for expansion.
Content: social science
Although a few scholars in the social sciences have come forward to participate in
discussions about environment and development or human dimensions of global
change, many of the pertinent findings of the social sciences other than economics
(e.g. sociology, anthropology, political science, human geography, psychology) are
still not incorporated. It is not clear how existing research on cultural identity,
social change, political cultures, nature–society relations, international politics or
individual development can enrich our understanding of possible futures – a lack
which is itself an indictment.
The gap arising from the paucity of attention to prominent social science the-
ory is compounded by the lack of attention to, or visibility of, less-known innova-
tive voices outside the social science mainstream. Those whose views might expand
the conventional range of debate, or who question hallowed assumptions, are usu-
ally not heard. People doing creative work on a number of theoretical fronts, who
may not have published on the subject of planetary futures but who deal with
relevant topics, could greatly expand notions of what is possible. For example,
critical theorists and oppositional political economists have not chosen, for the
most part, to apply their efforts to the economy, institutional structures, politics
or social arrangements of alternative futures, nor have they always been effective
when choosing to do so. An encouraging counter-example is the flourishing of a
vigorous school of ecological economists, who have brought a new, valuable per-
spective to economic questions. In general, however, theorists outside the confines
of conventional disciplines – such as bioregionalists and others concerned with
regional and cultural diversity, contemplators of the meaning of place and tech-
nology theorists – conduct a largely unacknowledged parallel debate on environ-
ment and development.
Beyond the realm of theory, reservoirs of experience have been generated in
praxis across a wide spectrum ranging from applied social sciences (such as devel-
opment, design, architecture, planning, appropriate technology) to social and
political activism. A truly enriched debate, one that includes ‘passionate’ as well as
‘dispassionate’ social science, would draw from (for example) proponents of bot-
tom-up development, decentralization, local self-reliance; from advocates for the