Peter Nichols is an avid outdoorsman and one of Colorado’s leading water law attorneys. It’s not uncommon to see him enter the lobby of his Boulder office at Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti—a room with stone, hardwoods, and a sharp-dressed receptionist—in wrinkled attorney attire and a pair of worn river sandals. By his own reckoning, being a water law attorney is his sixth career. “Ski bum was my first,” he says. Then came a job with the Colorado General Assembly, positions helping western communities deal with rapid energy development, and water rights consulting work with energy companies themselves. In 2001, Nichols returned to the University of Colorado, where he received his M.P.A. in 1982, to earn his J.D., with a focus on water law. He has been setting precedents in Colorado watersheds ever since.

One of his proudest accomplishments, he says, was a 2013 Colorado Supreme Court case that affirmed the prerogative of conservation groups to encumber water rights in conservation easements, to address ecological and supply problems in Colorado’s rivers. So was giving a presentation that inspired the Colorado Interbasin Compact Committee, which oversees development of the Colorado Water Plan—a historic blueprint for collaborative, statewide water management in the face of rapid population growth. But of all his accomplishments, his work in Colorado’s Arkansas River Basin is the most important, he says. It’s “the crucible” for how the West is going to handle the severe water shortages projected across the rapidly growing Rocky Mountain region.

“The problem began here,” he says, “and if we’re going to solve it, we’re going to have to solve it here.” The problem he is referring to is an urban water acquisition trend known as buy-and-dry.

In a buy-and-dry acquisition, a municipal water utility will meet a city’s growing demand for water by purchasing interests in irrigated agricultural land, permanently fallowing that land, and diverting its water into the taps of city residents. On Colorado’s Arkansas River—where no water is available for new uses and there is a constant call for additional supplies—buy-and-dry tactics have diminished farmland across the basin. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, where the Arkansas River courses through Colorado’s eastern prairie, agricultural communities in some counties have been absolutely devastated.

Nichols says, “the Colorado Water Plan is very focused on eliminating buy-and-dry.” The question is how to do it. “We can’t stop cities from getting the water they need, but maybe we can change the rules [of the game], so it’s not a free-for-all.” The most promising game changer, he believes, is the Super Ditch.

Launch of the Super Ditch

West of the 100th meridian, where supplemental irrigation is required to grow food, irrigation ditches are a common means of delivering water from a river, lake, or reservoir to users along its course. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, there are approximately 20 major mutual irrigation ditch systems. The Super Ditch, however, is not a real ditch. Rather, it’s a corporation—the Lower Arkansas Valley Super Ditch Company, Inc.—set up to provide leased agricultural water to cities as an alternative to the buy-and-dry trend. It represents seven ditch companies operating eight ditches between two reservoirs, the Pueblo and the John Martin.

The Super Ditch began leasing water for the first time this year, through a small pilot project. But it was incorporated in 2008, with the assistance of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District (LAVWCD), a special district established by voters in 2002. Those who voted for the district, whether they owned water or not, were tired of seeing what they considered “their river” diverted to cities more than 100 miles away—some of which lay in completely different river basins. Even urban voters in the City of Pueblo, a steel town on the Arkansas River (population 108,000), sided with rural farmers in the face of economic hardships. “Not one more drop!” became a rallying cry against water leaving the valley.

Nichols serves as special counsel to the LAVWCD and helped the district develop the Super Ditch concept. Inspiration came from California, where the Palo Verde Irrigation District launched a long-term fallowing-leasing program with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) in 2005. The contract between the two entities seeks to supply 27 southern California coastal communities, including San Diego and Los Angeles, with 3.63 million acre-feet of Colorado River water from one ditch over a 35-year period. Participating farmers stop irrigating for a designated period of time, fallow their fields, and receive payment for their water, which bypasses their farms on its journey to MWD customers.

The LAVWCD sought to create a similar project, predicated on a rotational fallowing-leasing concept, but the Super Ditch was a much more sophisticated undertaking. Facilitating work with seven different mutual ditch companies, each with its own board and governance structure, was fraught with challenges. The cumbersome nature of Colorado water law, and the powerful market mechanisms and path dependencies that guide urban water acquisition strategies in the state complicated matters further. Colorado municipalities are hesitant to rely on water leasing, and for good reason. Certainty of supply is critical, and the temporary nature of leasing versus the permanent nature of ownership is unsettling to most urban water providers. What happens if the population grows by 50,000 people, and the leased water those people are relying upon is no longer available—or is sold to a competing water provider?

Nichols tried to develop the Super Ditch concept in ways that addressed these concerns. Supplies from different farmers are pooled by the Super Ditch, and provided to cities under long-term lease contracts. To guarantee that leased supplies are available once the lease period ends, the LAVWCD began working with farmers to place conservation easements on participating farms—protecting them from development and tying the water to the land in perpetuity to ensure future production potential. While enabling temporary transfers, the easements eliminate the possibility of any permanent water severance, diversion, or change in use. In other words: no buy-and-dry.

Conservation easements have protected the fabric of agricultural communities across Colorado and around the nation. An easement-protected land base creates assurances that the future production potential of an agricultural community will be maintained in the face of land conversion threats stemming from urban sprawl, oil and gas development, or municipal buy-and-dry. With the land base protected, related agricultural industries are able to invest in the region with confidence. That, in turn, has a net positive impact on Main Street.

In May 2015, the Super Ditch delivered its first water supplies: five farms on the Catlin Canal provided 500 acre-feet of water to the city of Fountain (pop 27,000), the city of Security (pop 18,000), and the town of Fowler (pop 1,200). Fountain Water Resource Engineer Michael Fink says, “the city took delivery without a hitch,” adding that the long-term success of the program depends on ensuring that the Super Ditch doesn’t advance a supply-side economic model.

Nichols says that’s not a problem. “Cities can lease [from farmers] three in 10 years or 30 percent of the time. They have the responsibility to let farmers know in advance [when they will be leasing]. But for the most part, cities don’t need water in dry years, they need it the year after to refill storage [reservoirs].”

By fallowing one-third of their fields three out of every ten years, farmers “rest” 100 percent of their land once in a ten-year period—a process that supports recommended practices in crop rotation and soil management, while allowing water itself to become a cash crop. Nichols reports that with three-out-of-ten-year crop rotation, a demand of 25,000 acre-feet of water can be met by involving 40 percent of the irrigators. Some farmers believe that as many as 80 percent will want to participate. Participants will certainly be needed: the supply gap in the Arkansas River Basin is projected to grow to 88,000 acre-feet or more by 2050. The litmus test for success will be if large cities responsible for the majority of buy-and-dry activity—Aurora (population 346,000) and Colorado Springs (population 440,000)—sign on to the program. “Municipal acceptance of leasing rather than buying,” Nichols says, “remains the principle challenge.”

From Pioneer to Buy-and-Dry

In the Lower Arkansas Valley, water has divided communities for much of the 20th century. In the 19th century, it divided entire nations. The river here delineated three international boundaries over time: between Spain and the United States following the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, which codified the border of the Louisiana Purchase between the two countries; between Mexico and the United States following Mexican independence from Spain in 1821; and between the Republic of Texas and the U.S. before Texas’s annexation in 1845. Two years after the Adams–Onís Treaty was signed, the Santa Fe Trail was established along the river’s course, bringing traders, soldiers, miners, and settlers into Colorado. Those pioneers developed some of Colorado’s earliest settlements—and, with them, water diversion projects along the river’s banks.

The West is dry, and even though the Arkansas River is the Mississippi River’s second longest tributary, it carries very little water in Colorado. Consider how quickly waters in the Lower Arkansas Valley were appropriated. Following the earliest appropriation in 1861, the Homestead Act of 1862 was enacted. More water rights were developed with settlement. By 1874, the last water rights decree still in priority 100 percent of the time (meaning there is always enough water in the river to serve it) was established—two years before Colorado gained statehood in 1876.

Water rights that were appropriated in 1887 are in priority less than 50 percent of the time today. Water rights from 1896 are in priority less than 10 percent of the time. This means that a modern farmer in the Arkansas Valley with an 1896 water right established by his great-grandfather will be able to irrigate just 10 percent of the time given average precipitation. The rest of the time, when there is a “call on the river”—meaning there is not enough water in the system to serve all rights holders—he must desist from diverting water to his fields, so that more senior water-rights holders can use it.

With the Arkansas River overappropriated before the turn of the century, cities began purchasing water from farmers as early as the 1890s. But shortages or conflicts were also addressed through the development of trans-basin diversion projects (which moved water from other river basins into the Arkansas) or storage projects (which sought to capture surplus water behind dams during high flow periods). These projects reached their thresholds in the 1970s. It was then that cities began seriously looking to irrigated lands.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Colorado Springs and Aurora, working with corporate landholders and the City of Pueblo, acquired interests in 55,000 acres of farmland served by the Colorado Canal. The cities subsequently diverted nearly 70,000 acre-feet of water for municipal use, drying up the vast majority of Crowley County. Crowley became the buy-and-dry poster child, and continues to hold that undistinguished title today. Poverty rates exceed 35 percent. Main streets are shadows of the communities that existed there in the mid-20th century. Noxious weed infestation and dust storms are common on dried-up lands. Restoring these farms to native prairie is not only expensive but, in practice, ranges from difficult to impossible.

Today, the losses of irrigated agriculture from water sales in the Lower Arkansas Valley exceed 100,000 acres, representing more than 150,000 acre-feet of water annually. Some farms continue operations by temporarily leasing land or water from the cities they sold to, but those leases will soon expire, advancing even greater losses. In a region that historically irrigated 320,000 acres of farmland, one-third of the tilled ground is now dry, few if any economically viable land use alternatives exist, and people are wondering if a tipping point is coming that will mark the collapse of irrigated agriculture in the area.

“As in much of the West, agriculture is at the heart of this region’s cultural heritage,” says Summer Waters, director of Western Lands and Communities, a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “However, we have entered an era in which cities are becoming part of our legacy too. This leaves us with a question that we have to answer collectively: what will the new West look like?”

“Ideally, both cities and agricultural areas will be able to co-exist in the new West,” Waters says. “The key to striking that balance lies in how we manage our water supplies. The Super Ditch concept is an innovative way to build flexibility into our water systems, and flexibility is critical in times when supply is uncertain.”

A Promising Pepper in an Unpromising Place

Mike Bartolo is visibly frustrated. He worries that water transfers will displace agriculture. “We’re losing some of the best growing land in the state,” he says. “These are prime soils that don’t exist in other places. How do you create certainty in the industry [when this is going on]? That’s the question.”

Bartolo, who holds a Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of Minnesota, is a member of the water faculty at Colorado State University (CSU) and a senior research scientist at CSU’s Arkansas Valley Research Center. He sits on the Super Ditch board of directors, representing the Bessemer Ditch (one of the eight participating ditches), where he is a shareholder. With an 1861 water right, the Bessemer provides one of the most senior and reliable sources of water to farms anywhere in the Lower Arkansas Valley, and it irrigates some of the valley’s best lands. Bartolo is still grieving the 2009 loss of 28 percent of the water in the ditch—sold by farmers he knows to the Pueblo Board of Water Works (PBWW), the utility that provides municipal water to the City of Pueblo.

According to Nichols, there have been occasions when cities strategically approached farmers during the worst of times—when some combination of recession, drought, low commodities prices, overleveraging, or other factors forced their hand. But it is equally true that retiring farmers have assembled collectives to negotiate bulk water sales to cities. The Bessemer Ditch shareholders who sold 5,540 shares to PBWW for $10,150 per share (a share of Bessemer ditch water irrigates approximately one acre) were largely retiring farmers without heirs, responding to falling commodity prices and looking to capitalize on the increasing value of water following the severe drought of 2002. The eventual sale in 2009 netted them more than $56 million. Consider that dry land in this region often sells for less than $300 per acre, and you get a sense of where land values lie: in the water. Wanting to protect other producers and the agricultural fabric of the communities served by the Bessemer, Bartolo tried to convince farmers not to sell—to no avail. “I said, ‘let’s look at other options, at conservation easements, at the Super Ditch,’ but you have to realize how long these sellers had been working on this. Even if they were open to alternatives, my ideas were pie in the sky compared to the cash offer they had in hand.” (The Super Ditch was established but not operational at that time.)

Growers in the region have a great deal of respect for Bartolo. He’s a fourth-generation farmer, credited with developing the Mosco variety of Mirasol green chile pepper—the most popular variety of green chile grown locally and a centerpiece at the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival, which draws more than 100,000 Coloradans each year. Whole Foods recently decided to stock stores with Mosco chiles from the Arkansas Valley rather than Hatch chiles from New Mexico—a blow to the pride of New Mexicans, whose state vegetable is the chile pepper.

Bartolo developed the Mosco chile from seeds his father gathered at the home of Mike’s uncle, Harry Mosco, following his death in 1988. Mike planted the seeds. “One plant I grew was different,” he says. “It had better yield, bigger fruit, and meatier flesh, which made it easier to roast.” Mike made single plant selections beginning with that plant. He isolated the characteristics he wanted and repeated the process, developing the chile over a fifteen-year period.

Many celebrated produce items come out of the Lower Arkansas Valley, Rocky Ford cantaloupes and Mosco chiles being principle among them. Mike has grown them all. Still, when it comes to changing the playing field, as the Super Ditch is looking to do, Mike concedes there is a lot of work ahead. “It has become politically incorrect for cities to buy-and-dry, but that hasn’t stopped other speculators [from playing the role municipal water utilities were playing].” Earlier this year, Pure Cycle, a water and wastewater services company that leases 14,600 acres of land on the Fort Lyon Canal to tenant farmers, sold the farms to an affiliate of C&A Companies and Resource Land Holdings, LLC. C&A is a company with plans to provide Arkansas River water to Front Range cities to the north. “These alternative transfer mechanisms have to be really well defined, and they have to have a history behind them to be able to compete,” Bartolo says. They need to be, he adds, just as adept and quick at providing cash in hand as an outright water sale.

Water as Cash Crop

The value of water out West is only increasing. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, a lot of wealth is embedded in the water farmers own. It seems ironic that communities in possession of such a valuable asset are confronted with poverty and decline. More puzzling still is the fact that farmers are liquidating an asset whose value only continues to grow. Ask any investment advisor, “Would you dispose of an asset predicted to continue increasing in value?” and he or she is likely to say “no . . . unless I had no other choice, or unless there was no other way to see returns from that asset.”

When it comes to water, the problem right now is that there is a strict dichotomy of choices. Farmers who own it have limited means to earn money from it except by: (1) growing food with it and planning for returns based on commodities prices, or (2) selling it and cashing out on its current value. Part of the reason choices are limited has to do with the cumbersome nature of Colorado water law. A lease of water from farm to city can necessitate a change-of-use case in the water courts. A change case involves engineering studies and legal expertise and can run tens of thousands of dollars. The change case proponent must demonstrate to the courts that third-party water rights holders, such as downstream farmers who rely on the same ditch, will not be harmed. If the courts or third parties challenge that premise, the cost of the change case can escalate into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Going through this process for a temporary lease, coupled with cities’ desires to guarantee permanency of supply in the face of growth, is another factor that has historically limited water leasing.

The Super Ditch, through legislation advanced by Nichols in 2013, enabled these checks and balances to take place through a much more efficient administrative process overseen by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). Now, Bartolo and Nichols hope to see what happens when farmers have more than two choices. Their belief is that if farmers can retain water ownership, grow food, and realize earnings from “commodity water” at the same time—as they would from other types of assets—the economic outlook for the Lower Arkansas Valley will change.

This outlook is borne out by economic studies. As the Super Ditch concept was gaining steam in 2007, CH2M Hill agricultural economist George Oamek compared different options for farmers: sell water, continue to farm, or continue to farm while participating in a rotational fallowing-leasing program. His projections indicated that, over a 40-year horizon, farmers who sold their water would earn more than farmers who continued to farm, but farmers who continued to farm and participated in the fallowing-leasing program stood to gain the most of all. In a comment to the Pueblo Chieftain following the study, Oamek said that the Super Ditch could ensure the best price for farmers: “In economics, you look at collaboration as a way to draw out a higher price.”

For the same reason, however, the fallowing-leasing concept is a tough sell to large cities.

Following Oamek’s principle of collaboration, cities have been working together to acquire agricultural water supplies at low prices. City skepticism is heightened by inflationary concerns. If water cost is only going to increase, why not purchase supplies now, while prices are low, in order to keep utility rates down?

To address this matter, Nichols looked at different mechanisms for establishing price escalators that would protect buyers and sellers, including:

1. a market-based escalator, based upon other water conveyances;
2. an escalator based upon average municipal water impact fee increases over time;
3. an escalator based upon average municipal water rate increases over time; and
4. a cost-based escalator, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Producer Price Index (PPI).

The pilot project with Fountain, Security, and Fowler guarantees pricing stability by adjusting the lease price every five years according to the percent change in the Colorado Municipal League’s Index of Colorado Utility Costs.

At $500 an acre-foot, the current Super Ditch lease will earn the five participating farmers a quarter of a million dollars this year in addition to the revenues they will earn from crop production on non-fallowed lands. Some of these crops, such as forage, are low-value crops, and the water lease provides good income in lieu of growing them. Others, like melons and chiles, are high-value crops. Bartolo is excited about the retention of these agricultural revenues, which he thinks will create a ripple effect across the valley’s many communities: “Two acre-feet of water grows an acre of chile—that’s 1,000 bushels,” he says, “which brings in $10,000 to $15,000 in revenue at the farm gate level.”

Although municipal water prices are increasing, considering the shortages the West faces, they’re still low by most counts. Cities have sought to keep prices low by acquiring as much water as they can, as early as they can, while keeping within the bounds of Colorado’s anti-speculation doctrine.

By blurring the lines around the “types” of water that drive prices—both at the tap (utilities prices) and at the head gate (commodities prices)—the Super Ditch may launch a disruptive innovation that could alter the price of water in ways that better reflect Western realities. If farmers retain control of water and lease to cities, prices will adjust according to increasing demand in a field of diversified ownership. That’s a new type of competition in the market, and that’s not a bad thing. Urban growth won’t have to correspond with rural decline. And a glass of water will still be the cheapest beverage to wash down a plate of locally grown chile rellenos.

Scott Campbell is an award-winning conservation planner and consultant whose assembles diverse teams to solve complex environmental, social, and economic problems. Scott was the 2015 Lincoln Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a joint fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Prior to his fellowship, Scott directed one of the country’s largest land trusts, the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation.

Photograph: John Wark/Airphoto NA

Entre los escarpados picos de las montañas de San Juan, en el cuadrante noreste de la frontera regional de Four Corners, hay un grupo de cinco condados en el sudoeste de Colorado cuyos nombres evocan la historia rica y diversa de la región: Montezuma, San Juan, La Plata, Dolores, y Archuleta.

También es diversa la manera de vivir y la economía de la región, desde el turismo y la agricultura hasta la extracción de combustibles fósiles. Menos de 100.000 personas habitan esta heterogénea y montañosa región. Las ciudades de Durango y Cortez representan un poco de vida semiurbana relativamente bulliciosa, pero el resto de esta zona de 17.000 km2, aproximadamente el tamaño del estado de Connecticut, está salpicada por pequeños pueblos de montaña y dos reservas indígenas.

En estas comunidades remotas, la planificación del futuro se ha hecho mucho más incierta en el siglo XXI, ya que el comodín del cambio climático y el comportamiento caprichoso de la industria energética han reducido las apuestas seguras. Desde muchos puntos de vista, es cada vez más difícil hacer pronósticos fundamentados sobre las décadas futuras, desde los precios e ingresos impredecibles de la industria del gas natural hasta las bruscas variaciones en la acumulación de nieve, que afectan por igual al caudal de los ríos, las cosechas y la temporada de esquí. Y muchas variables están fuertemente interconectadas.

“Nuestra pregunta más importante tiene que ver con la vulnerabilidad a la sequía”, dice Dick White, concejal de Durango. “Nuestra agricultura y el turismo podrían quedar completamente trastornados si llega a suceder una sequía prolongada, con muchos incendios naturales”.

Reconociendo la necesidad de una mayor coordinación política, un grupo regional de entidades gubernamentales formó el Consejo de Gobiernos del Sudoeste de Colorado a fines de 2009 para hacer frente a los desafíos más importantes y buscar oportunidades de colaboración. Sin embargo, no ha quedado claramente definida en términos políticos la hoja de ruta para lograr estabilidad, sostenibilidad y prosperidad económica.

Los interrogantes podrían simplemente superar el alcance de las herramientas de planificación convencionales, dicen los observadores. La disciplina de planificación regional, por supuesto, se ha ejercido desde hace muchas décadas, pero los procedimientos, plantillas y modelos empleados, desde los métodos “visionistas” a los “normativos”, “predictivos” o de “líneas de tendencia”, no siempre permiten luchar contra las incertidumbres irreductibles. Por eso, el Consejo del Sudoeste de Colorado se embarcó el año pasado en un proceso de asociación intensiva con Western Lands and Communities, un programa conjunto del Sonoran Institute y el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, para desarrollar una herramienta de política emergente que incorpore la propia idea de incertidumbre: la Planificación Exploratoria de Escenarios (Exploratory Scenario Planning o XSP). A diferencia de los procesos de planificación normativos o tradicionales, este no trata de lo preferible (una expresión de valores comunitarios) sino de lo que podría ocurrir más allá del control de los planificadores involucrados.

XSP requiere que los participantes identifiquen las fuentes más importantes de incertidumbre en su comunidad y que usen estos desafíos para imaginar escenarios alternativos para el futuro. Mientras que las formas más tradicionales de planificación de escenarios normalmente llegan a considerar sólo de dos a cuatro escenarios, el Consejo del Sudoeste de Colorado creó ocho escenarios durante sus sesiones de XSP.

A comienzos de 2015, consultores, expertos y gestores de políticas regionales se reunieron en la ciudad de Durango para despejar una cuestión fundamental para la generación de escenarios relevantes: “Dada la posibilidad de una sequía prolongada en el tiempo y su impacto ambiental potencial, ¿cómo podría la región de estos cinco condados desarrollar una economía más versátil?”

Esta pregunta, que el grupo consideró mediante un metódico proceso comunitario, fue el foco de un extenso proceso de recopilación y análisis de datos. Esta investigación culminó en dos talleres estructurados para explorar una variedad de “futuros” regionales, es decir, las maneras posibles y verosímiles en que podría desarrollarse la vida en el sudoeste de Colorado. El horizonte temporal se fijó en 25 años, es decir, hasta el año 2040.

Los participantes consideraron los impactos interrelacionados de varias áreas críticas de incertidumbre, como la duración de una sequía potencial, los niveles locales de producción de gas natural y el precio del petróleo.

La idea central subyacente de la metodología de XSP es reunir a las partes interesadas para generar un proceso de planificación de múltiples pasos que imagine muchos futuros y formule las conclusiones estratégicas correspondientes. Sus pasos metodológicos son básicamente los siguientes: primero, formular una serie de preguntas centrales; después, identificar y clasificar de forma precisa las fuerzas del cambio; a continuación, crear narrativas sobre los posibles escenarios y sus implicaciones; y finalmente formular respuestas activas y discernir las acciones que se podrían utilizar para responder a estos múltiples escenarios. Este proceso, dice Miriam Gillow-Wiles, directora ejecutiva del Consejo de Gobiernos del Sudoeste de Colorado, creó una nueva manera de ayudar a planificadores y gestores de políticas a imaginar las dinámicas regionales. “Creo que con esto el consejo de gobiernos ya no es simplemente otra organización gubernamental o de desarrollo económico más, porque estamos haciendo algo distinto”, dice.

El proyecto fue otro paso del Sonoran Institute y el Instituto Lincoln para ajustar el concepto y en última instancia demostrar el valor de la planificación exploratoria de escenarios (que tiene sus raíces en la administración de empresas y la esfera militar) en el contexto de la planificación urbana y regional. Se han explorado otros estudios de caso recientes en Arizona central, la Cuenca Superior del río Verde y el pueblo de Sahuarita, justo al sur de Tucson, Arizona.

“Esto es algo que no sólo es una buena idea desde el punto de vista intelectual”, dice Peter Pollock, gerente de Western Programs en el Instituto Lincoln. “Agregará un valor real al proceso de planificación comunitaria para tratar con problemas reales”.

Una gama de futuros

En el sudoeste de Colorado hay que lidiar con problemas reales y realmente difíciles, ya que la región enfrenta una serie desalentadora de cambios simultáneos, según un informe de 2015 titulado “Motores de cambio en el Oeste Intermontañas” (Driving Forces of Change in the Intermountain West), preparado como parte del proceso de planificación exploratoria de escenarios. Algunos son demográficos: el influjo de la población, con un mayor porcentaje de la población hispana, combinado con la urbanización. Otros tienen que ver con la naturaleza “incierta y compleja” de las industrias de energía, afectadas por los patrones volátiles de la economía mundial.

El Concejal White de Durango City dice que él y sus colegas dirigentes han tenido que reflexionar mucho sobre estos cambios a medida que la ciudad considera una variedad de proyectos de infraestructura, desde ampliar el sistema de tratamiento de aguas servidas hasta aumentar el tamaño del aeropuerto. White, exprofesor de astronomía de Smith College que se jubiló temprano y se mudó al Oeste para involucrarse en políticas medioambientales, fue un miembro clave del grupo que se reunió en Durango el año pasado como parte del Consejo de Gobiernos del Sudoeste de Colorado.

“Uno se enfrenta a esta amplia gama de futuros posibles, y no sabe realmente qué camino tomar”, dice. “La idea es identificar los riesgos mayores y las mejores políticas de las que no tengamos que arrepentirnos”.

Para White, el ejercicio de imaginarse cómo las distintas condiciones de sequía podrían afectar toda la economía regional ayudó a aclarar los temas. “Conceptualmente, creo que esta es una herramienta política extraordinariamente útil”, dice. Las cuestiones de la red de alcantarillado y la infraestructura del aeropuerto se pudieron analizar posteriormente desde una nueva perspectiva: “Hemos podido analizar estas dos decisiones a través de la lente de la planificación [exploratoria] de escenarios”. Dadas las incertidumbres sobre el futuro, White dice estar decidido a hacer inversiones que proporcionen flexibilidad a los gestores de políticas del futuro, en caso que necesiten realizar más cambios en la infraestructura.

Las acciones y estrategias finales de “bajo nivel de arrepentimiento” identificadas por las partes interesadas fueron: mejorar la coordinación con las agencias federales de administración de bosques; establecer sociedades público-privadas para promover el uso de biomasa y biocombustibles; hacer una evaluación de los suelos disponibles para desarrollar; identificar nuevas oportunidades para aumentar los recursos hídricos de aguas subterráneas; cobrar los costos reales del servicio de agua y tarifas realistas; y apoyar a las pequeñas empresas y a las incubadoras agrícolas.

Esas conclusiones y las nuevas perspectivas asociadas muchas veces no son fáciles de conseguir, conceden los planificadores y participantes. La planificación exploratoria de escenarios, como demostró el proyecto del sudoeste de Colorado, puede ser un proceso muy exigente.

Hannah Oliver, que co-coordinó el esfuerzo de planificación de escenarios como gerente del programa Western Lands and Communities en el Sonoran Institute, recuerda haber viajado por toda la región del sudoeste de Colorado para poder conocer sus tierras y sus gentes, haciendo muchas entrevistas con partes interesadas. Y ello solamente para preparar el trabajo de base (llamado “evaluación de temas”) de las reuniones con los participantes.

El objetivo de estos talleres es extender los límites de lo posible manteniéndonos al tiempo dentro de límites realistas. “No queremos planificar escenarios tan extravagantes que los miembros de la comunidad no puedan imaginarse viviendo en ellos”, dice. El proceso intenta generar lo que Oliver y su co-coordinador Ralph Marra, de Southwest Water Resources Consulting, llaman momentos “ajá” de descubrimiento. En este caso, los participantes llegaron a comprender las profundas implicaciones de una producción menor de gas, sequías severas y variaciones bruscas en el precio del petróleo, junto con su efecto en cadena sobre el turismo y la agricultura, y su profundo impacto en la economía regional. Se dieron cuenta de que el sudoeste de Colorado podría enfrentar un futuro muy distinto si se produjeran ciertas condiciones verosímiles.

“Sales exhausto”, dice Oliver de un taller inicial típico. “Para los participantes es como ir a un campo de entrenamiento militar. La gente que sale del taller dice: ‘Nunca he tenido que pensar de esa manera’”.

Para los miembros de la comunidad, sin duda puede hacer falta mucha concentración para considerar todas las variables. “Creo que toda la planificación de escenarios —si X, entonces Y— es una manera realmente útil de analizar las cosas”, dice Gillow-Wiles. “Pero el proceso en sí puede ser un desafío, porque hay tantas incógnitas”.

Enseñanzas

Una clave del éxito, en todo caso, es reunir a una amplia gama de personas en la misma sala. En una región grande y geográficamente dispersa, esto puede ser un desafío. “Es realmente importante tener una diversidad de opiniones”, dice Oliver, quien ahora es planificadora municipal en Phoenix. “Porque lo que obtienes de estos talleres es tan bueno como lo que pones”.

Algunos participantes del sudoeste de Colorado sugieren que si se hubiera enmarcado el ejercicio más directamente en el desarrollo económico o en un tema de infraestructura más específico (en vez de la sequía), habrían participado más gestores de políticas. “A veces es difícil conseguir que los miembros de las juntas directivas se compenetren con ejercicios abstractos”, dice Willow-Giles, “en vez de con algo más tangible como: ‘¿Qué haremos dentro de 25 años con nuestros sistemas de tránsito para satisfacer las necesidades de una población en constante crecimiento?’”.

De manera similar, White advierte que la capacidad para generar impulso y energía comunitaria no es automática. “Si tuviera que extraer una enseñanza”, señala, es que “hay que esforzarse mucho para asegurar que se tienen representantes realmente diversos en ambos extremos del proceso”.

La región del sudoeste de Colorado tiene su propia cuota de temas candentes, como la política sobre el cambio climático y la dinámica de las compañías de hidrocarburos, pero los participantes señalaron que evitaron estos temas durante el proceso de XSP. (Muchos hicieron notar que la sequía llevaba afectando a la región mucho tiempo, incluso antes de la Revolución Industrial; es más, los antiguos indígenas Pueblo probablemente abandonaron sus conocidas viviendas en los riscos de Mesa Verde debido a las condiciones de sequía).

Pollock dice que una de las virtudes de la XSP es que permite, e incluso alienta, las opiniones conflictivas que pueden hacer el proceso más inclusivo, tanto en términos de proceso como de resultados. Minimiza las discusiones sobre cuál es el futuro “correcto” y ayuda a crear apoyo a la acción entre el grupo diverso que se ha reunido para desarrollar estrategias. “Creemos que esta es una manera de desactivar las cuestiones políticas que hacen que nuestro proceso público sea demasiado rencoroso y difícil”, dice.

Al incorporar ideas diversas desde el inicio del proceso, y aceptar abiertamente la incertidumbre, la planificación exploratoria de escenarios puede generar al final menos sorpresas para una comunidad, según Uri Avin, profesor de investigación y director del Centro de Planificación y Diseño del Centro Nacional de Crecimiento Inteligente de la Universidad de Maryland. “Los que se oponen a una cierta visión final pueden aparecer una vez elaborado el plan de visión y ponerse en contra”, dice. “Por el contrario, los escenarios exploratorios tienden a invitar a la disensión y el debate de forma explícita, y a la construcción de escenarios que incluyan otros puntos de vista”.

Una de las duras verdades que puede emerger de un proceso tan abierto y sincero es la realidad de que se puede producir un cambio negativo bajo condiciones futuras muy verosímiles. Oliver dice que los participantes se dieron cuenta, en efecto, de que había que escudriñar ciertas suposiciones lineales sobre el futuro económico de la región.

“Creo que lo que les provocó una gran sacudida fue comprender que la industria del petróleo y el gas quizás no existan para siempre”, dijo Oliver. “Una de las cosas más importantes de la que se dieron cuenta fue lo mucho que dependían de los ingresos de la producción de gas natural para obtener servicios básicos. Se dieron cuenta que si el petróleo y el gas desaparecieran, ya no podrían ofrecer tantos servicios”.

Avin dice que la XSP opera como una especie de antídoto a la noción tradicional de los planes como fórmula mágica. Pero, políticamente, no es fácil vender realismo. “Puede ser necesario aceptar la decadencia o el cambio, y eso puede no ser agradable, pero será inevitable si ocurren ciertas cosas”, dice. “Así que la traba inicial para los planificadores es la de estar convencidos de haber comprendido el problema y persuadir a sus jefes, los funcionarios electos, de que esta es una buena manera de planificar, y que el beneficio se obtendrá a largo plazo”.

Armando Carbonell, director del Departamento de Planificación y Forma Urbana del Instituto Lincoln, dice que en una era en que hay que tener en cuenta ciertos factores como el cambio climático, los planificadores y el público tienen que reconsiderar cada vez más la manera de conceptualizar el futuro. “La clave estriba en cómo se piensa sobre la incertidumbre”, dice. “Estaremos mejor si aceptamos la incertidumbre y el hecho de que es irreductible. Tenemos que aprender a vivir con la incertidumbre, lo cual no es una posición en absoluto cómoda para la gente o los planificadores”:

El proceso puede ser, por así decirlo, “más largo en el corto plazo”, dice Avin, pero “más corto en el largo plazo”, si las comunidades deciden su estrategia basándose en condiciones realistas. “Puede ser un proceso más riguroso y difícil, pero vale la pena porque se explora una gama de posibilidades que hasta cierto punto nos protege del futuro”, dice.

El documento de trabajo de 2014 del Instituto Lincoln titulado “Planificación exploratoria de escenarios: Lecciones aprendidas en terreno” (Exploratory Scenario Planning: Lessons Learned from the Field), de Eric J. Roberts del Instituto de Construcción de Consenso, llega a ciertas conclusiones preliminares obtenidas a partir de una variedad de otros proyectos nacionales, concentrándose tanto en lo que funcionó bien en otros contextos como en los desafíos habituales que se plantearon. Los participantes generalmente elogian el diseño del proceso y el trabajo de contextualización de los escenarios, dice Roberts, pero la capacidad de la organización auspiciante tiene que estar a la altura de los desafíos.

Una herramienta adaptativa y evolutiva

Si uno se separa del proyecto de Colorado y otras pruebas piloto recientes, queda claro que la incorporación de la planificación exploratoria de escenarios en el marco de la planificación tradicional de suelo dista mucho de haberse completado, a pesar de su poder y potencial. Parte de la solución pasa por difundir esta metodología más ampliamente y aumentar el acceso a sus instrumentos. El informe de 2012 del Instituto Lincoln titulado “Acceso abierto a las herramientas de planificación de escenarios” (Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools) examina este proceso evolutivo. Señala que “la aparición de herramientas nuevas y mejoradas de planificación de escenarios en los últimos 10 años ofrece la promesa de que su uso vaya en aumento y que el objetivo de brindar acceso abierto al potencial pleno de las herramientas de planificación de escenario se encuentra a nuestro alcance”.

Uno de los coautores del informe, Ray Quay, investigador del Centro de Decisión para una Ciudad del Desierto de la Universidad Estatal de Arizona, dice que ha estado utilizando la metodología de planificación exploratoria de escenarios desde hace 20 años. Si bien ve que los planificadores de recursos, aguas y bosques la usan, todavía no se ha popularizado entre los planificadores de suelo y los urbanistas. “Pienso que indudablemente en ciertas situaciones puede ser muy útil”, dice Quay.

Otra barrera contra una adopción más amplia es que no se ha distinguido esta metodología de otros tipos más conocidos de planificación de escenarios, según Carbonell, del Instituto Lincoln. “Cuando uno dice ‘planificación de escenarios’, la mayoría de la gente en el campo de la planificación piensa en Envision Utah, los grandes planes de visión regionales que sirven para que la gente se ponga de acuerdo en una cierta visión preferida del futuro”, dice.

La “genealogía” intelectual de XSP se remonta a la Red de Negocios Globales (Global Business Network) de comienzos de la década de 1990, y sus raíces más profundas se encuentran en el trabajo de planificación de escenarios de Royal Dutch Shell que, según la leyenda, produjo estrategias muy exitosas, señala Carbonell. “El desafío estriba en transferirla del campo de la estrategia de planificación corporativa y empresarial, y difundirla más allá de unos pocos expertos”, dice. “Por eso es tan importante trabajar sobre el método y hacerlo más accesible y eficiente”.

En general, el desafío sigue siendo incorporar plenamente la metodología al mundo de la planificación. “Creo que fundamentalmente estamos tratando de hacer dos cosas”, dice Carbonell. “Estamos tratando de transferir un modelo de planificación empresarial a un modelo de planificación comunitaria, así que sin duda hay diferencias en el modelo de gobierno y la cantidad de gente a la que hay que hacer participar. El otro factor es la escala, el tamaño de la comunidad y el área que uno tiene que integrar. La planificación de escenarios ha surgido principalmente del nivel regional”.

Las preguntas pertinentes serán si las comunidades de menor escala tienen o no el conocimiento, los datos y la voluntad de participar; en última instancia, se trata de saber si XSP es la herramienta “apropiada para las decisiones que se tienen que tomar”, dice Carbonell.

A medida que se use con más frecuencia la planificación exploratoria de escenarios en la planificación regional y urbana, irán surgiendo más prácticas de referencia. Y los métodos para diseñar estrategias en la fase final de XSP pueden variar de una situación a otra. Summer Waters, directora del programa Western Lands and Communities, dice: “Las estrategias resultantes tienen que ser políticamente aceptables. Es decir, la gente con la que trabajamos tiene que poder convencer a sus electores de que acepten y adopten sus conclusiones”.

Quay dice que a estas alturas el proceso de generación de escenarios por medio de XSP ya se ha “perfeccionado” mucho. Pero todavía hay trabajo que realizar en el paso final de identificar acciones que aborden múltiples escenarios y formulen una estrategia apropiada. “El problema es que las conclusiones estratégicas a las que se ha llegado… han sido distintas en todos los proyectos en los que he trabajado”, dice Quay. “Hay tanto de estructura como de arte en este proceso”.

Avin, de la Universidad de Maryland, coincide en que algunos aspectos de estos métodos poderosos están todavía concretándose. Pero no hay razón, dice, para demorar su adopción. “XSP no tiene el respaldo de herramientas y modelos de la misma manera que el proceso ‘visionista’ tiene”, dice. Pero se han desarrollado ya suficientes escenarios para que los planificadores se beneficien de ellos y los adopten en vez de comenzar desde el principio, dice.

Como ejemplo del trabajo paralelo realizado en otro campo, los expertos mencionan el trabajo de escenarios avanzados de la Junta de Recursos de Transporte y la herramienta de software asociada que se desarrolló, llamada Impacts 2050. Los planificadores interesados en obtener un mayor contexto y ejemplos encontrarán una diversidad de fuentes detalladas en el libro de 2007 del Instituto Lincoln titulado “Comprometidos con el futuro” (Engaging the FutureLa conformación de los siguientes cien años” (Shaping the Next One Hundred YearsGobernanza anticipatoria” (Anticipatory Governance), publicado en el Journal of the American Planning Association.

Holway, Jim. C. J. Gabbe, Frank Hebbert, Jason Lally, Robert Matthews, y Ray Quay. 2012. Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Hopkins, Lewis D., y Marisa A. Zapata. 2007. Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lempert, Robert J., Steven W. Popper, y Steven C. Bankes. 2003. Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis. RAND.

Quay, Ray. 2010. “Anticipatory Governance: A Tool for Climate Change Adaptation.” Journal of the American Planning Association 76(4).

Amid the jagged peaks of the San Juan Mountains, in the northeast quadrant of the Four Corners regional border, is a cluster of five southwestern Colorado counties whose names evoke the region’s rich and diverse history: Montezuma, San Juan, La Plata, Dolores, Archuleta.

Diverse, too, is the way of life and the economy of the region—from tourism and agriculture to fossil fuel extraction. Fewer than 100,000 people populate the varied and mountainous area. The cities of Durango and Cortez represent a bit of relatively bustling semi-urban life, while small mountain towns and two Native American reservations occupy outposts across the 6,500-square-mile area, roughly the size of Connecticut.

For these far-flung communities, planning for the future has become much more uncertain in the 21st century, as the wildcard of climate change and the vagaries of the energy industry have minimized sure bets. Educated guesses about the coming decades are getting harder to make across many dimensions: from unpredictable prices and revenues within the natural gas industry to swings in the size of the snowpack, affecting river flow, crops, and skiing alike. And many variables are highly interconnected.

“Our biggest question is our vulnerability to drought,” says Dick White, city councilor in Durango. “Our agricultural and tourism industry could be totally disrupted if we go into long-term drought and have lots of wildfires.”

Recognizing the need for wider policy coordination, a regional group of governing bodies formed the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments in late 2009, to address larger challenges and to seek out collaborative opportunities. Yet, in terms of policy, the road-map to stability, sustainability, and economic prosperity has not necessarily become clearer.

The conundrums at hand may simply surpass the conventional planning tools themselves, observers say. Regional planning as a discipline, of course, stretches back decades, but the procedures, templates, and models employed—from “visioning” to “normative,” “predictive,” or “trendline” methods—are not always up to the task of grappling with irreducible uncertainties. So, last year, the Southwest Colorado Council embarked on an intensive process in partnership with Western Lands and Communities—a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—with an emerging policy tool that embraces the very idea of uncertainty: exploratory scenario planning, or XSP. Unlike the normative or traditional planning processes, it is not about what is preferred—an expression of community values—it is about what may happen beyond the control of planners involved.

XSP requires participants to identify the greatest causes of uncertainty in their community and use those challenges to envision alternative scenarios of the future. Whereas two to four scenarios would typically result from more traditional forms of scenario planning, the Southwest Colorado Council created eight scenarios during their XSP sessions.

Early in 2015, consultants, experts, and regional policy makers converged in the city of Durango to unpack a crucial question that would generate relevant scenarios: “Given the possibility of extended long-term drought and its potential environmental impacts, how could the Five-County Region develop a more adaptable economy?”

The question—which the group worked out through a careful, community-oriented process—became the focus of an extensive process of fact-gathering and analysis. This research culminated in two workshops structured to explore a variety of regional “futures”—the possible and plausible ways in which life in southwest Colorado could play out. The time horizon was to be 25 years, through 2040.

Participants considered the interrelated impacts of several critical areas of uncertainty, including the length of potential drought, local production levels of natural gas, and the cost of oil.

The central idea behind XSP is to bring together stakeholders to advance a multistep planning process that imagines many futures and formulates strategic insights accordingly. Its methodological steps are roughly: first, formulate a core set of questions; then, precisely identify and rank the forces of change; next, create narratives around possible scenarios and their implications; and, finally, formulate active responses and discern actions that would help address multiple scenarios. The process, says Miriam Gillow-Wiles, executive director of the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments, furnished a fresh way to help planners and policy makers imagine regional dynamics. “I think it set the council of governments up to be not just another economic development organization or government organization, because we are doing something different,” she says.

The project was also another step by Sonoran and Lincoln toward fine-tuning the concept and ultimately testing the value of exploratory scenario planning—which has its early roots in the business management and military spheres—in the context of urban and regional planning. Other recent case studies have been explored in central Arizona, in the Upper Verde River Watershed and the Town of Sahuarita, just south of Tucson, Arizona.

“This is something that is not only a good idea intellectually,” says Peter Pollock, manager of Western Programs at the Lincoln Institute. “It will add real value to your community planning process to deal with real problems.”

A Range of Futures

Dealing with real—and really tough—problems is the name of the game in southwest Colorado, as the region faces a “daunting” array of changes all at once, according to a 2015 report, “Driving Forces of Change in the Intermountain West,” prepared as part of the exploratory scenario planning process. Some are demographic—inflow of population, with more Hispanics, coupled with urbanization. Others relate to the “uncertain and complex” nature of the energy industries, which are affected by volatile global economic patterns.

Durango City Councilor White says he and fellow policy makers have been forced to think a lot about these shifts as their city considers a variety of infrastructure projects, from expanding the sewer treatment system to growing the size of the airport. White, a former Smith College astronomy professor who retired early and moved West to get involved in environmental policy, was a key member of the group that met last year in Durango as part of the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments.

“You’ve got this range of possible futures, and you really don’t know which road you’re going to go down,” he says. “The idea is to identify the biggest risks and best ‘no regrets’ policies.”

For White, the entire exercise of gaming out how varying drought conditions might affect the whole regional economy helped clarify issues. “Conceptually, I find that an extraordinarily useful policy tool,” he says. The sewer and airport infrastructure questions have subsequently been cast in a new light: “I have seen both of these decisions through the lens of [exploratory] scenario planning.” Given future uncertainties, White says he is determined to make investments that will give future policy makers flexibility should they need to make further infrastructure changes.

The final “low-regret” actions and strategies that stakeholders identified included: better coordination with federal agencies on forest management, public-private partnerships to promote use of biomass and biofuel, assessments of available land for development, identifying new opportunities to augment water resources from groundwater, the charging of real costs for water service and realistic impact fees, and support for small business and agriculture incubators.

Those insights and associated new perspectives are often hard-won, planners and participants concede. Exploratory scenario planning, as the southwest Colorado project demonstrated, can be a demanding process.

Hannah Oliver, who co-facilitated the scenario planning effort as a program manager with the Sonoran Institute in the Western Lands and Communities program, recalls driving all over the southwest Colorado region to get a feel for its land and its people and conducting many interviews with stakeholders. And that was just to prepare the groundwork—the “issues assessment”—for the stakeholder meetings.

The goal of the workshops themselves is to push the boundaries of the possible while staying within the bounds of the realistic. “You don’t want the scenarios to be so outlandish that community members can’t see themselves in it,” she says. The process aims to generate what Oliver, who was joined as a facilitator by Ralph Marra of Southwest Water Resources Consulting, calls “Ah-hah” moments. In this case, participants came to understand the profound implications of lower gas production, severe drought, and swings in oil prices—with ripple effects across the tourism and agriculture industries and with deep overall impacts on the regional economy. Southwest Colorado, they realized, could face a very different future under certain plausible conditions.

“You come out exhausted,” Oliver says of the typical initial workshop. “For the participants, it’s like going to a boot camp. People coming out of that workshop say, ‘I’ve never had to think like that before.’”

For community members, it can certainly take a lot of concentration to juggle the variables. “I think the whole way of scenario planning—if X, then Y—is a really useful way to look at things,” says Gillow-Wiles. But “the whole process itself can be challenging, because there are so many unknowns.”

Lessons Learned

A key to success, in any case, is to gather a broad range of people into the same room. In a wide and geographically dispersed region, that can be challenging. “Having a diversity of opinions is really important,” says Oliver, who is now a village planner in Phoenix. “Because the stuff you get out of the workshops is only as good as what goes in.”

Some southwest Colorado participants suggest that framing the exercise more directly around economic development or a more specific infrastructure issue (opposed to drought) might have attracted more participation from policy makers. “It’s sometimes hard to get your board members to buy into that kind of pie-in-the-sky type of thing,” says Willow-Giles, “versus something more tangible like ‘What do we do with our population growth in terms of transportation 25 years from now?’”

Likewise, White cautions that the ability to create momentum and community energy is not a given. “If I had a lesson to draw,” he notes, it’s that “you have to really work hard to make sure that you continue to have appropriately diverse representatives at both ends of the process.”

The southwest Colorado region has its share of political hot-button issues—including the politics of climate change and the dynamics of the fossil fuel companies there—but participants report that they steered clear of the land mines during the XSP process. (Drought, many note, has long afflicted the region, even prior to the Industrial Revolution; indeed, the ancient Puebloans likely left their famed cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde because of dry conditions.)

Pollock says that one of the virtues of XSP is that it allows in and even encourages conflicting views that can make it more inclusive, both in terms of process and outcomes. It minimizes arguments about which future is “right,” and it helps build support for action among the diverse group that has come together to develop the strategies. “We think it is a way to defuse some of the political questions that make our public process overly rancorous and difficult,” he says.

By bringing diverse ideas into the process early and openly embracing uncertainty, exploratory scenario planning can yield fewer surprises in the end for a community, according to Uri Avin, research professor and director of the Center for Planning and Design at the National Center for Smart Growth, University of Maryland. “The opponents of your end-state vision may, at the end of your visioning plan, come out of the woodwork and fight you,” he says. “Whereas exploratory scenarios explicitly tend to invite dissention and debate, and the construction of scenarios that embrace other viewpoints.”

One of the stark truths that can emerge from such a candid process is the reality that negative change may be likely under very plausible future conditions. Oliver says that participants in fact came to the realization that certain linear assumptions about the region’s economic future may need to be scrutinized.

“I think what struck them is the understanding that the oil and gas industry may not be around forever,” says Oliver. One of the biggest things they realized was how much they relied on money from natural gas production for basic services, she says. “They realized they might not be able to offer as many services if oil and gas were gone.”

Avin says that XSP operates as a kind of antidote to the traditional notion of plans-as-silver bullets. But, politically, that realism can be a challenging sell. “It may include accepting decline or change that may not be palatable but may be inevitable if certain things happen,” he says. “So the initial hurdle for planners is getting their arms around it and persuading their bosses who are elected officials that this is a good way to plan, and the payoff is in the long run.”

Armando Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute, says that, in an era when factors like climate change are now in play, planners and the public must increasingly rethink the way they conceptualize the future. “The key is how one thinks about uncertainty,” he says. “We’re better off to accept uncertainty, and the fact that uncertainty is irreducible. We need to learn to live with uncertainty, which is not at all a comfortable position for people and planners.”

The process can be, so to speak, “longer in the short run,” Avin notes, yet it’s “shorter in the long run,” as communities strategize based on realistic conditions. “It may be more rigorous and difficult, but it pays off because you have explored a range of outcomes that protect you from the future to some degree,” he says.

The Lincoln Institute’s 2014 working paper “Exploratory Scenario Planning: Lessons Learned from the Field,” authored by Eric J. Roberts of the Consensus Building Institute, provides some preliminary insights gleaned from a variety of other projects nationally, focusing both on what worked well in other contexts and typical challenges encountered. The process design and scenario framing work are often rated highly by participants, Roberts finds, but the capacity of the convening organization must be up to the demanding challenges.

An Adaptive and Evolving Tool

Step back from the Colorado project and other recent pilot applications, and it becomes clear that the migration of exploratory scenario planning into mainstream land planning is still far from complete, despite its power and potential. Part of the solution is wider dissemination and increased access to the method’s instruments. The Lincoln Institute’s 2012 report Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools surveys the evolving landscape. It notes, “The emergence of new and improved scenario planning tools over the last 10 years offers promise that the use of scenario planning can increase and that the goal of providing open access to the full potential of scenario planning tools is within reach.”

One of the report’s coauthors, Ray Quay, a researcher with the Decision Center for a Desert City at Arizona State University, says that he has been using the exploratory scenario planning methodology for 20 years now. While he sees it being used by planners in the resource, water, and forestry communities, it has not yet taken hold among land planners and urban planners. “I think there are certainly situations where it can be very useful,” Quay says.

Another barrier to wider adoption is the general failure to distinguish the methodology from other, more familiar kinds of scenario planning, according to Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute. “When you say ‘scenario planning’ to most people in the planning world, they think of Envision Utah—the big regional vision plans that got people to agree on some preferred vision of the future,” he says.

The intellectual “genealogy” of XSP traces back to the Global Business Network in the early 1990s, and its deepest roots lie in the scenario planning work of Royal Dutch Shell—which, as legend has it, produced very successful strategies, Carbonell notes. “The challenge is taking it out of the world of corporate planning and business strategy and getting participation by more than a few wonks,” he says. “That’s why working on the method, making it more accessible and efficient, is important.”

Overall, the challenge remains to bring the methodology fully into the planning world. “I think we’re primarily trying to do two things,” says Carbonell. “We’re trying to transfer a business planning model to a community planning model, so there are definitely differences in governance and the number of people to deal with. The other thing is scale, the size of the community and the area you deal with. Scenario planning has really come more out of the regional level.”

The pertinent questions will be whether or not smaller-scale communities have the expertise, data, and willingness to participate; but ultimately it will be about whether XSP is “appropriate to the decisions being made,” Carbonell says.

As exploratory scenario planning is used more often in regional and urban planning, further best practices will certainly emerge. And the methods of devising strategies in the final phase of XSP may vary from situation to situation. Summer Waters, program director of Western Lands and Communities, says, “The resulting strategies have to be politically acceptable. That is to say, the people we work with have to be able to convince their constituents to buy in.”

Quay says the process leading to the production of scenarios through XSP has been largely “perfected” at this point. But there’s work to be done on the final step of identifying actions that address multiple scenarios and formulating an appropriate strategy. “The problem is that distilling the strategic insights … has been different on all the projects I’ve worked on,” Quay says. “There’s both structure and art within it.”

Avin, of the University of Maryland, agrees that some aspects of these powerful methods are still being worked out. But that’s no reason, he argues, to delay their adoption. “XSP is not supported by tools and models in the way that visioning is supported,” he says. But enough scenarios have been developed that planners can benefit from considering them and adapting them, rather than starting from scratch, he says.

For examples of parallel work in another field, experts note some of the advanced scenario work by the Transportation Resource Board and the associated software tool developed, Impacts 2050. Planners interested in more context and examples will find a diversity of deep sources in the Lincoln Institute’s 2007 book Engaging the FutureShaping the Next One Hundred YearsJournal of the American Planning Association.

Holway, Jim. C. J. Gabbe, Frank Hebbert, Jason Lally, Robert Matthews, and Ray Quay. 2012. Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Hopkins, Lewis D., and Marisa A. Zapata. 2007. Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lempert, Robert J., Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes. 2003. Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis. RAND.

Quay, Ray. 2010. “Anticipatory Governance: A Tool for Climate Change Adaptation.” Journal of the American Planning Association 76(4).