Uncertain Futures
Uncertain Futures

Author: Jens Beckert

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0192552759

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Uncertain Futures considers how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. It starts from the premise that dynamic capitalist economies are characterized by relentless innovation and novelty and hence exhibit an indeterminacy that cannot be reduced to measurable risk. The organizing question then becomes how economic actors form expectations and make decisions despite the uncertainty they face. This edited volume lays the foundations for a new model of economic reasoning by showing how, in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act. It draws on groundbreaking research in economic sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology to present theoretically grounded empirical case studies. These demonstrate how grand narratives, central bank forward guidance, economic forecasts, finance models, business plans, visions of technological futures, and new era stories influence behaviour and become instruments of power in markets and societies. The market impact of shared calculative devices, social narratives, and contingent imaginaries underlines the rationale for a new form of narrative economics.

Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty
Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty

Author: Vincent A. W. J. Marchau

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 3030052524

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This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.

Uncertain Futures
Uncertain Futures

Author: Alexander F. Gazmararian

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-20

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1009405314

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Why is the world not moving fast enough to solve the climate crisis? Politics stand in the way, but experts hope that green investments, compensation, and retraining could unlock the impasse. However, these measures often lack credibility. Not only do communities fear these policies could be reversed, but they have seen promises broken before. Uncertain Futures proposes solutions to make more credible promises that build support for the energy transition. It examines the perspectives of workers, communities, and companies, arguing that the climate impasse is best understood by viewing the problem from the ground up. Featuring voices on the front lines such as a commissioner in Carbon County deciding whether to welcome wind, executives at energy companies searching for solutions, mayors and unions in Minnesota battling for local jobs, and fairgoers in coal country navigating their uncertain future, this book contends that making economic transitions work means making promises credible.

Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures
Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures

Author: Majia Nadesan

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2022-09-29

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0128227974

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Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems. Chapters assess the economies, geographies and politics of current and future energy landscapes, exposing how dominant assemblages (composed of technologies, strategies, knowledge and authorities) change our understanding of security and risk, and how they these shared understandings are often enacted uncritically in policy. Contributors address integral relationships across the production and government of material and human energies and the opportunities for sustainable and democratic governance. In addition, the book explores how interest groups advance idealized energy futures and energy imaginaries. The work delves into the role that states, market organizations and civil society play in envisioned energy change. It assesses how risks and security are formulated in relation to economics, politics, ecology, and human health. It concludes by integrating the relationships between alternative energies and governance strategies, including issues of centralization and decentralization, suggesting approaches to engineer democracy into decision-making about energy assemblages. - Explores descriptive and normative relationships between energy and democracy - Reviews how changing energy demand and governance threaten democracies and democratic institutions - Identifies what participative energy transformations look like when paired with energy security - Reviews what happens to social, economic and political infrastructures in the process of achieving sustainable and democratic transitions

Global Trends 2040
Global Trends 2040

Author: National Intelligence Council

Publisher: Cosimo Reports

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9781646794973

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"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

How to Use Exploratory Scenario Planning (Xsp)
How to Use Exploratory Scenario Planning (Xsp)

Author: Jeremy Stapleton

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08-15

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9781558444058

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Exploratory scenario planning (XSP) can help communities prepare for uncertainties posed by climate change, pandemics, automation, and other unprecedented twenty-first-century challenges. This manual is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in using this emergent planning approach, which is effective at the local, regional, or organizational level. Through the XSP process, stakeholders envision and develop various potential futures (i.e., scenarios) and consider how to measure and prepare for each, rather than working toward a single shared vision for the future. Through instructive case studies, recommendations, sample workshop agendas, and more, this manual equips would-be practitioners with the background knowledge, procedural guidance, and practical strategies to implement this planning tool successfully. Readers will be prepared to facilitate--or even lead--an effective, impactful XSP process in their own settings.

An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda
An Uncertain Future - Anticipating Oil in Uganda

Author: Annika Witte

Publisher: Göttingen University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3863953606

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The discovery of oil in Uganda in 2006 ushered in an oil-age era with new prospects of unforeseen riches. However, after an initial exploration boom developments stalled. Unlike other countries with major oil discoveries, Uganda has been slow in developing its oil. In fact, over ten years after the first discoveries, there is still no oil. During the time of the research for this book between 2012 and 2015, Uganda’s oil had not yet fully materialised but was becoming. The overarching characteristic of this research project was waiting for the big changes to come: a waiting characterised by indeterminacy. There is a timeline but every year it gets expanded and in 2018 having oil still seems to belong to an uncertain future. This book looks at the waiting period as a time of not-yet-ness and describes the practices of future- and resource-making in Uganda. How did Ugandans handle the new resource wealth and how did they imagine their future with oil to be? This ethnography is concerned with Uganda’s oil and the way Ugandans anticipated different futures with it: promising futures of wealth and development and disturbing futures of destruction and suffering. The book works out how uncertainty was an underlying feature of these anticipations and how risks and risk discourses shaped the imaginations of possible futures. Much of the talk around the oil involved the dichotomy of blessing or curse and it was not clear, which one the oil would be. Rather than adding another assessment of what the future with oil will be like, this book describes the predictions and prophesies as an essential part of how resources are being made. This ethnography shows how various actors in Uganda, from the state, the oil industry, the civil society, and the extractive communities, have tried to negotiate their position in the oil arena. Annika Witte argues in this book that by establishing their risks and using them as power resources actors can influence the becoming of oil as a resource and their own place in a petro-future. The book offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of Uganda’s oil and the negotiations that took place in an oil state to be.

Biofuels, Solar and Wind as Renewable Energy Systems
Biofuels, Solar and Wind as Renewable Energy Systems

Author: D. Pimentel

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-07-22

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1402086547

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The petroleum age began about 150 years ago. Easily available energy has s- ported major advances in agriculture, industry, transportation, and indeed many diverse activities valued by humans. Now world petroleum and natural gas s- plies have peaked and their supplies will slowly decline over the next 40–50 years until depleted. Although small amounts of petroleum and natural gas will remain underground, it will be energetically and economically impossible to extract. In the United States, coal supplies could be available for as long as 40–50 years, depending on how rapidly coal is utilized as a replacement for petroleum and natural gas. Having been comfortable with the security provided by fossil energy, especially petroleum and natural gas, we appear to be slow to recognize the energy crisis in the U. S. and world. Serious energy conservation and research on viable renewable - ergy technologies are needed. Several renewable energy technologies already exist, but sound research is needed to improve their effectiveness and economics. Most of the renewable energy technologies are in uenced by geographic location and face problems of intermittent energy supply and storage. Most renewable technologies require extensive land; a few researchers have even suggested that one-half of all land biomass could be harvested in order to supply the U. S. with 30% of its liquid fuel! Some optimistic investigations of renewable energy have failed to recognize that only 0. 1% of the solar energy is captured annually in the U. S.

Understanding Energy and Energy Policy
Understanding Energy and Energy Policy

Author: Timothy Braun

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1780329369

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Activists, scientists and policymakers around the world have long argued that we need to find sustainable and secure solutions to the world's energy demands. At issue for citizens worldwide is whether we are scientifically literate enough to understand the potential policy choices before us. Understanding Energy and Energy Policy is a one-stop resource for understanding the complexities of energy policy and the science behind the utilization of energy sources. The multidisciplinary perspective presented in this book is necessary for readers to be able to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of potential energy policies. The book draws on case studies from the global North and South, from countries that are resource poor and resource rich, while providing explanations of the science and politics behind burning fossil fuels, and power created through nuclear energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, wind energy, biofuels and water.

Imagined Futures
Imagined Futures

Author: Jens Beckert

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0674545893

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In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.