Introduction

Humanity has become a dominant force of change up to the planetary scale (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2015). A dreadful outcome is the wrecking of the Biosphere, despite decades of global conservation efforts. Recent global environmental assessments indicate that wildlife populations have dropped 68% on average since 1970 (WWF 2020) and one million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades (IPBES 2019a). The future looks even more grim when considering that humanity is way off track in limiting global warming to 1.5°C (UNFCCC 2021). These global assessments univocally stress the need for deep, transformative changes in human societies and economies if internationally agreed-upon sustainability goals are to be achieved (Díaz et al. 2019; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2020). Indeed, supported by the present state of knowledge, human agency in the Anthropocene should be able to “bend the curve” and create sustainable futures for people and nature (Steffen et al. 2011; Bai et al. 2016; Leclère et al. 2020).
The internationally agreed-upon target space for a sustainable development trajectory is presented by the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations through its 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets – that is, the future we want (UN General Assembly 2012, 2015). Yet, while the Agenda 2030 is forward-looking and aspirational, there is no universal understanding of what a sustainable world for nature and people actually looks like, let alone how to get there. In fact, as people in different places and contexts around the world experience, depend on, and relate to nature in many different ways, opening-up for pluralistic perspectives on the futures we want is imperative. What is clear, however, is that most people and societies need to fundamentally rewire their relationships with nature and each other; that there is an urgent need for new ideas, visions and narratives of people-nature relationships to enact transformative change towards just and sustainable futures for life on Earth (Bai et al. 2016; Bennett et al. 2021; Wyborn et al. 2021).
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is actively supporting the development of new narratives of desirable nature futures around the world. Building on the findings of the IPBES Thematic Assessment on Scenarios and Models, the IPBES Task Force on Scenarios and Models is mandated to catalyze the development of new nature-centered multi-scale scenarios that are based on positive visions for human relationships with nature (IPBES 2016, 2019b). An important outcome so far is the development of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF). This heuristic tool is used for the collaborative creation of visions and narratives to open up a plurality of perspectives on people-nature relationships while it simultaneously offers a structure for consistency in the development of nature scenarios across multiple scales and diverse contexts (Pereira et al. 2020). Place-based applications of the NFF may i) provide insights into commonalities and divergences across desired visions of nature around the world and their translation into goals and targets, ii) identify scalable policies and actions for achieving desired futures, and iii) develop more diverse sets of indicators to assess progress (Pereira et al. 2020). Currently, there is an articulated need to extend the use of the NFF in real-world case studies to operationalize it globally and to drive an inductive process to develop and refine a family of new nature scenarios (Rosa et al. 2017; IPBES 2019b; Pereira et al. 2020).
At the same time, promising initiatives that seek to transform the way humans interact with nature are already happening ‘on the ground’. A notable example where new narratives are being explored is the bottom-up development process of National Park Hollandse Duinen (NPHD) in the Netherlands. The ambition of this new National Park is to be a showcase of how people and nature can co-exist (NPHD 2017, 2020a). The surface area of ~450 km2 covers the entire coastline of the province of Zuid Holland, including sea, beaches, dunes, forests, agriculture, urban infrastructure and over a million inhabitants (Veenstra 2020). The geo-morphological foundation was laid 5000 years ago and the interacting forces of nature and humans have shaped this landscape ever since, resulting in exceptional socioeconomic, cultural and ecological values (Van Heeringen and Van der Velde 2017; Neefjes 2018). Current pressures however, including various forms of pollution, urbanization, climate change and sea level rise, are interacting and mounting. A group of local and regional actors recognized that, in the face of the Anthropocene, maintaining the unique landscape qualities and values requires an integrated and collaborative effort that actively engages with the social-ecological complexity and dynamism of the landscape. They initiated a National Park that aims to “reinforce the quality and resilience of both natural and cultural heritage in the landscape of the park by empowering people and organizations to create synergy between natural processes and human activities” (NPHD 2017). Thus, rather than through strict protection, this National Park seeks to safeguard and even enhance biodiversity values by taking an inclusive approach that is rooted in social-ecological systems thinking (Palomo et al. 2014; Cumming et al. 2015; Cumming and Allen 2017). Yet, to achieve its aim and realize its mission, NPHD faces a daunting change process involving numerous actors, interests and desires.
The SDGs, the NFF, and NPHD can be seen as three distinct developments that stem from the same philosophy to reconfigure people-nature interactions towards the mutual benefit and sustenance of all, that is, towards attaining the futures we want. As such, a pertinent question is how these developments may be synergistically combined to purposefully inform and reinforce each other towards that common aim, also speaking to a broader challenge of useful integration of approaches in sustainability research (Lang et al. 2012). In this paper, we present an innovative approach to explore desirable nature futures, consisting of a participatory workshop process and analytical framework. We developed the approach through an application in the NPHD. The workshop process strategically links the NFF to the Three Horizons Framework (Sharpe et al. 2016) to capture diverse perspectives on nature and develop the capacity of stakeholders of NPHD to envision desirable futures and explore transformative changes to get there. The analytical framework is developed to analyse the content of the workshop outputs and consists of a thematic analysis and an SDG Target analysis. The overarching aim of this study is twofold: test the NFF at the regional scale and inform the development trajectory of NPHD. The latter includes the potential to develop insights for achieving the SDGs.
We first give a detailed recipe of the workshop process including an introduction of the core frameworks used. We then present the analytical framework and report the results of the approach. In the discussion we reflect on the outcomes and discuss how these outcomes may feed into both the broader development process of the National Park as well as the inductive scenario development process catalyzed by IPBES. We also discuss how to further improve the approach and point to future research needs.