While all the groups discussed each of the three time horizons, the groups differed in which horizon was explored the most. ‘How Green is Red?’ and ‘Our park Hollandse Duinen’ focused mostly on discussing the future of NPHD in the third horizon, while ‘The Bridge Builders’ left the third horizon more open but spent relatively more time unpacking the first Horizon to identify what needs to remain and what needs to change. The second horizon was least explored. The second horizon was also used strategically to park major trade-offs or taboo’s that need to be addressed at some point but could not be solved during the workshop discussion. Examples are intensive agriculture, what is fair distribution and allocation of scarce space, and whether or not the national park should engage with behavioral change.

Plenary discussion and synthesis

The plenary discussion during the final step of the process highlighted several cross-cutting factors. Multiple participants mentioned that the large scale of NPHD with multiple functions offers opportunities to collaborate on shared goals, but more effort needs to go into identifying and taking away fundamental barriers. The participants articulated the need to identify a shared set of key values and principles to self-organize their collective efforts, like “a swarm of starlings”, or the “DNA of NPHD”, without compromising on the richness and diversity of nature values that can be found in the National Park. A pertinent follow-up question that was brought up is how to monitor progress and success. At the end of the workshop we asked people what they would like for a follow-up workshop. Some participants expressed the desire to have more time to continue unfinished discussions or to talk and work more towards concrete actions. For example, someone said: ”now we need to get more concrete; now we need maps and start drawing”.

Thematic analysis

We identified 9 thematic categories to present the output generated during the exploration of the third horizon (Table 2). These categories emerged through comparing and integrating clusters made by participants with the thematic categories presented by other applications of the NFF (PBL 2020; Rana et al. 2020).