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Short abstract

This contribution demonstrates a participatory scenario planning tool for humble engagement with normative uncertainty in hydrogen transitions, allowing participants to engage with value change, value conflict, value incommensurability and moral ambiguity.

Long abstract

Hydrogen futures play a central role in contemporary energy transition governance, yet they are often shaped by reductionist assumptions about society and the stability of normative orientations and values. We conceptualise humility as the acknowledgment of ongoing and irreducible normative uncertainty arising from value conflict, value incommensurability, value change, and moral uncertainty. This paper proposes participatory scenario planning as a methodology for enabling more reflexive and humble engagement with hydrogen futures.

Participatory scenario planning has been identified as a promising technology of humility in energy governance, yet it has not been applied to hydrogen transitions. Unlike futuring approaches that converge on preferred pathways or stabilise expectations, it centres inclusiveness, multiplicity, contingency, and divergence. By enabling diverse actors to collaboratively construct and interpret multiple possible futures, the method resists political reductions of uncertainty and accommodates normative pluralism.

In this paper, we developed participatory scenario planning as a technology of humility for hydrogen transitions and report on how we have piloted the approach in a series of multi-actor future-making workshops. In the workshop component of this panel, we intend to demonstrate the method and invite participants to engage with key steps of constructing plural hydrogen futures and reflexively engaging with normative uncertainties.