If you have to imagine what your children' life will be in 20 years, or your grandchildren' life in 40 years, how the landscape they will be living will look like and what kind of interaction they will have with Nature, which tools or media would you use?

This imagination, let’s call it scenario, could apply to a whole community, and it could be used to guide planning towards the desired future.

How to ensure a plurality of community voices can be represented, and that these voices can then be integrated into decision-making and planning?

The  KESHO tool could guide you in building scenario through a participatory process, integrating traditional and local knowledge into quantitative and spatially explicit modeling. The framework was firstly developed through national and local case studies in Eastern Africa  and then widely applied across Africa and beyond. 

Our study published in Regional Environmental Change journal shows an application of KESHO to investigate how land use and climate pressures may reshape the unique  Etosha landscape dryland, in Namibia. In the past few decades, Namibia has devoted a strong effort in increasing  coverage of protected and conserved areas, but great challenges are foreseen for the future.  In this study we investigated how the current development trend could lead to fulfill local development and conservation objectives, along with international goals for sustainability and biodiversity conservation, and in the long term the Africa Sustainability Agenda 2064. By using KESHO participatory scenario planning framework, we co-designed  with local communities three plausible alternative future pathways, and the impacts these would imply: Business-as-Usual (BAU); Agriculture & Livestock Production; Conservation & Sustainability. 

Outputs from this study demonstrate the value of a stakeholder-led approach in tackling conservation challenges and in planning for a sustainable future for an arid region heavily reliant on land-based livelihoods. The lesson learnt in Namibia case study can inform other countries facing similar challenges.