Scenarios are increasingly considered as a useful tool for private and public decision making processes, particularly in a longer-term perspective and in cases where current states and future development are characterised by a high degree of complexity and uncertainty. The German energy transition is such an area where technical developments and multifaceted social dynamics influence each other. The impact of scenarios on political decision making is difficult to measure. However, there is sound evidence that images about the future, including visions and expectations, can have a formative role for public policy making, and thus for the public.
Against this background, the presentation will, highlight challenges that are associated with scenarios in cases they are used for providing guidance to the transformation of socio-technical systems, such as the energy system.
We argue that the complexities, and particularly the interface between technology and society, i.e. consumers, users, customers, and other actors, their interests and behavioral patterns, which characterizes energy system transitions, needs to be reflected much more compared to predominantly applied scenarios focusing on techno-economic elements. The basic idea of socio-technical scenarios is to take into account the embedding of decisions on both the supply and the demand side in societal decision-making processes in a more systematic way.
However, to deliver suitable guidance a sustainability assessment of the scenarios is recommended, but resulting in additional methodological impediments if the systems boundaries of the socio-technical scenarios and the assessment fall apart.
Against this background, an integrated approach to address these challenges will be introduced and discussed, which is applied in the project ENERGY-TRANS. This approach can be described mainly by the following 4 phases:
1. Identification of relevant socio-technical facets and dynamics in the field investigated, translation into according driving factors, and elaboration of potential future development options for these factors.
2. Development of context scenarios, taking place within the analytical framework of the socio-technical scenarios. Both types of scenarios should be linked with modelling approaches that are able to understand and analyze the issues characterizing the scenarios.
3. Development of suitable sustainability indicator sets for the normative assessment of the scenarios.
4. Critical reflection of the approach applied and the results produced, in order to make pitfalls and open questions as transparent as possible.
Risk policy and regulation , Decision-making and uncertainty
