The global biodiversity crisis is reproduced and reinforced by a crisis of imagination: people’s capacity to reimagine how they relate to nature is constrained by dominant paradigms that limit what futures are considered possible. By inviting citizens and communities to imagine new futures, participatory visioning exercises offer one avenue for diversifying what possibilities are conceivable to participants and amplifying perspectives that challenge prevailing assumptions. Such interventions are especially potent in postcolonial contexts, where alternative ways of knowing and relating to nature can remain marginalized by legacies of epistemic domination. This is particularly consequential in African contexts, which are both underrepresented in global environmental futures and characterized by rich diversity of human-nature relationships and value systems.

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a tool for negotiating diverse values of nature proposed by the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Expert Group on Scenarios and Models, is a promising approach for navigating the diversity of worldviews present in African contexts and amplifying the future possibilities legible to those worldviews in global conversations about transformative nature futures. While the NFF has shown promise in guiding value-plural scenario development, empirical applications in participatory settings, including in African contexts, remain limited. This licentiate thesis presents two participatory visioning case studies that operationalized the NFF in African contexts at both the local and regional scale, articulating countervailing ideas able to represent a broader variety of geographical perspectives, nature values, and possibilities.

Paper 1 combined multiple techniques (including participatory visioning, artistic engagement, and expert-led scenarios) to explore possible futures for nature and people in Mzimba, Malawi. The process incited co-creation of desirable visions that challenged the boundaries of the prevailing narrative about Mzimba’s future, facilitated the creation of artistic outputs that invited audiences into the shared imagination co-produced by community participants, and enabled analysis of the multiple values that our partner community held for their woodland landscape.

Paper 2 applied a participatory futures approach to co-create continental-scale visions of sustainability transformation for Africa, as well as chronological pathways that explored how those visions might be achieved. By complicating the dominant perspective that human prosperity will necessarily create negative impacts for biodiversity, these futures suggest alternative development trajectories for the African continent in which nature and people can thrive together.

This licentiate thesis offers methodological prototypes for value-plural participatory visioning in African contexts at multiple scales, as well as alternative perspectives that may be capable of detecting previously illegible possibilities and suggesting previously unconsidered priorities for planning.