Co-developing desired visions for lake futures: A PLURALAKES facilitation guide

PLURALAKES is an international Water4All project that is co-creating actionable pathways for safeguarding lake ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. PLURALAKES developing and testing a novel approach to co-developing desired visions for lake futures, as well as pathways to achieving these visions. This approach includes co-developing visions of desired futures with local actors in each case study, then co-developing and modelling possible pathways to achieving these visions, and, finally, discussing the outputs of modelled and co-developed pathways with actors to identify preferred pathways. These visions and pathways will then be shared with decision makers to inform lake governance. This facilitation guide outlines the process of the visioning workshop, where local actors are invited to co-develop desired visions for their case study lake(s) and surrounding watershed(s). In these workshops, the NFF is used to broaden actors’ thinking about desired people-lake relations, and then the X-curve method is used to focus actors’ thinking about desired people-lake relations into distinct time horizons, together with specific opportunities (or seeds) and barriers to achieving these visions.