trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Figure 2. Evaluation and organisation of futures research methodology (Aaltonen 2009).Aaltonen (2009) analyses the categorisation presented in Figure 2 and states that the methods in thelower left corner are relatively easy-to-use and well known, whereas the methods in upper left corner aremore sophisticated and need some mathematical background as well as programming skills. Themethods in the lower right corner handle ambiguity better than the engineering approaches on the lefthand side, but are still limited e.g. in the number of interactions they can manage well. The methods inthe upper right corner have not been widely adopted nor wholly used because of poor understanding ofemergent and nonlinear phenomena. Thus these methods that handle social complexity have a big,unexploited potential.5. Making projections of sustainability with the frameworkNext we will discuss the framework introduced in Chapter 3 in context of making forecasts for twodifferent timeframes, i.e. up to five years and up to 20 years. The reason for this is to clarify thedifferences of suitable methods for making sensible forecast in a shorter and longer timeframe. We willconcentrate our analysis on the methods used in KULJETUS-project, i.e. literature review, nationalstatistics, web-based survey for hauliers, Delphi survey, and workshops. Besides of analysing differentmethods and data sources we will discuss the perspective of combining data gathered by differentmethods.The methods in the KULJETUS-project were chosen based on the examples given by Piecyk (2010)and other studies referred to in Chapter 2 on combining qualitative and quantitative data for betterunderstanding of the future. Our methods cover well the fourfold table in Figure 2 as we use literaturebasedenvironmental scanning and statistical modelling from the engineering approach, Delphi surveyfrom systems thinking approach and workshops as participatory method from social complexityapproach. The emphasis among the types of methods is in the engineering approach, as the statistical441