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Paper short abstract:

Looking back at our exploration of how people's engrained social norms and beliefs hinder their participation in social innovation, we now look forward to fostering people's Futures Literacy so they can reveal, refrain, rethink their assumptions and start imagine alternatives futures outside the box

Paper long abstract:

I will share the third phase of a multi-stage larger project I have been engaged with two community leaders in Kinangop, Kenya. We built on the outcomes of two focus groups we held with women and smallholder farmers in Kinangop, where we explored the perceived enablers and constraints that they face to engage in a social innovation project aimed at enhancing the dairy industry. With these outcomes, we realised the importance of grappling with people's engrained social norms and belief systems that could hinder their participation in such innovation. Fostering people's futures literacies could help to achieve that. We partnered with 3 Kenyan futures literacy experts to design and run a Futures Literacy Lab (FLL) to grapple with and shape these engrained and constraining social structures.

Futures Literacy is an action-based methodology developed by UNESCO for building capacity, i.e. futures literacies capability. It supports people in revealing, reframing, and rethinking the assumptions and beliefs they use when imagining the future. Our version of the lab builds on UNESCO's work (Miller, 2018); however, it questions some features and attempts to expand its epistemological and ontological assumptions to include cosmologies. It also departs from the very 'Western' and 'Universal' understanding of Futures and Literacy by exploring what it means to decolonise these two constructs and localising their meaning. In doing so, it aligns with a call to provincialising' futures literacies', fostering reflexivity and curiosity (Facer and Sriprakash, 2021; Myers et al., 2020).

Why does this matter for the community of Kinangop, and more broadly for other rural communities, and for the HDC community? As the call for proposals rightly points out, the immediate and visible fallout from crises may exacerbate existing inequalities in capabilities, leading to loss of income and employment, inequity, food insecurity, and malnutrition. With the projected increase in food demand by 50 per cent or more by 2050 (Food and Agriculture Organisation), and the intensifying race to find new resources in the face of unpredictable climate change, it is crucial to start envisioning a better future for those at the margins. Our project, rooted in the hopes and fears of the community, aims to build new imaginaries that nurture the capabilities needed to address the polycrisis.

Keywords: Futures Literacy, participatory methodology, community, social innovation