Transforming Biodiversity and Climate Governance in the Barotse Cultural Landscape of Zambia: Envisioning Futures Using the Nature Futures Framework

Zambia’s vision to attain middle-income status by 2030 and its strategic development plan are anchored on environmental sustainability. The main constraints to achieving these future goals are climate change and biodiversity loss. A missing aspect identified in the governance of biodiversity and climate is the limited participation of stakeholders in resource management. Engagement of multiple perspectives and plural values held by stakeholders and their relation to future management choices and sustainable outcomes through participatory future visioning processes is largely missing, particularly in biodiversity-rich mosaics such as the Barotse Cultural Landscape. This missing link has had powerful policy implications, as governance, in many instances, has produced, reproduced and upheld power structures that ignore locally and culturally relevant narratives necessary for transformative change. Using individual interviews and a participatory futures workshop with actors in the biodiversity and climate governance space in the Barotse Cultural Landscape, this study explores how futures methods can contribute to locally-led transformative change pathways. The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes approach is used to identify bottom-up biodiversity and climate initiatives in Zambia. They are used to develop alternative futures grounded in reality using the Nature Futures Framework nature value perspectives, i.e. Nature for Nature, Nature for Society and Nature as Culture, to gain an understanding of the local actors’ value perspectives. The study answers the question of what the pluralistic values and nature perspectives of the local actors in the Barotse Cultural Landscape are towards biodiversity and climate governance. This study contributes to the call to apply the Nature Futures Framework and operationalise its use.