Future Society in 2024: 21st Century 'Good Life' - Rural Economy ...

2. Purposes of the ‘Scenario Creation’ document
Scenarios can be described as a way of ‘telling stories about the future’ in order to help organisations
think about how things might change and what can be done to promote or prevent possible future
outcomes. The Government is interested in looking at how the countryside might develop in the
future using this approach. The purpose of the project is to help Defra (the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) in their ‘Horizon Scanning’ programme, develop new ideas and
thinking that will help create a better countryside in the future that provides maximum benefit to
the whole of society.
As a result of a process of analysis, forecasting and a workshop with some twenty experts, the Future
Foundation, an independent think tank, working with the Centre of Rural Economy at Newcastle
University has developed three potential scenarios for the twenty-year future of rural Britain and four
for the fifty-year future.
These are described in this document in order to invite feedback and ideas about how the scenarios
can be enriched and improved to make them more interesting and relevant to people today and make
the different policy implications clearer to the Government. The scenarios are described as if
mutually exclusive, but key to our approach is realising that there will be a mixture of different
outcomes, just as there is today.
In creating these scenarios we have been struck by the range of issues and questions the process has
raised about how we see the countryside, what we think it is for and who should be the beneficiaries
of the way in which it is developed and used. Ultimately, we hope that the exercise helps promote a
worthwhile and useful discussion about the real nature, purpose and value of the countryside to
society now and in the future.
Following the initial workshop, the scenarios (in draft form) were presented to and discussed with
members of the general public and at a stakeholder plenary consultation workshop. The process and
responses gained from these events have been summarised in the appendix and encapsulated under
each scenario heading.
Each scenario has been captured and represented by images developed in conjunction with an
associate from the Royal College of Art. Part of the project process is to test and evaluate this
method of summarising and communicating complex information as a stimulus and a tool.
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